About the RAD COHORT

The RAD Cohort aims to foster and highlight the importance of youth-led radical collaboration to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while integrating a justice-oriented approach to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). The ultimate goal is to equip youth with the skills, resources, and connections to transform their communities in ways that are collaborative, intersectional, creative, bold, and relevant to them.

Through a multi-month journey, participants explore dimensions to radical collaboration, working together alongside their peers and a community of mentors to: 

• RESEARCH gaps & opportunities for collaboration in their communities;

• ACTIVATE new partnerships to address these impact gaps, and, 

• DEEPEN connections & knowledge, eventually through the co-creation of a community activation project aimed at advancing radical collaboration.

WHY RAD COLLAB?

In 2015, then United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon introduced the Sustainable Development Goals by describing the need for what he called “transformative development.” It was a call to action for the world to approach global problems holistically, by tackling the ways different agendas overlap and amplify each other. 

Climate action – SDG 13 – presents an important opportunity to bring in diverse voices and actions together. However, few tools and efforts exist today to achieve a collaborative and cohesive approach to tackling the SDGs, in particular SDG 13. We think radical collaboration, which we define as “unusual and unexpected connections that spark transformative action,” is needed to bridge the silos that exist within and between current efforts to implement the SDGs.