Celebrating 10 Years of Community Engagement
Supporting UN SDGs
HKUST spearheaded the effort in Hong Kong to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to bring out the best in everyone. Through services targeted at each of the 17 meaningful goals, faculty, staff, students, and alumni joined hands to contribute to solving issues like poverty, climate change, and social justice.
On September 25th 2015, the UN general assembly adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new sustainable development agenda. Each goal had specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years. These 17 goals comprising 169 targets are part of an ambitious global plan to transform our world economically, socially, and environmentally.
As one of the first universities in Hong Kong to support the SDGs, we use these 17 goals to help steer our efforts to serve the local community in effective ways while fostering compassion and care in our graduates. We look forward to building a more benevolent world based on the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
In support of this global initiative HKUST Connect has focused on 6 of these goals, offering students service opportunities to address social issues such as poverty, hunger, health, education, and inequality.We promote the 17 UN SDGs to students and how they can contribute to solve each of them. Students are encouraged to discover the goals for themselves and learn more about what they can do to make a positive impact.
All of our service opportunities are matched with one or more goals to make students more aware of social issues around them. Through active learning, students who serve their community gain a firsthand experience in how to alleviate the situation of specific service recipients.
We believe that a university education is not a tool for generating personal wealth in order to further entrench privilege but a privilege that should be used to help generate a healthy, wealthy, and fair society.
So, please join us to support the UN's development goals and be part of the solution!
HKUST x UNV
Committed to engage in global volunteerism, HKUST is a partner university with United Nations Volunteers (UNV)-Hong Kong Volunteer Internship Program subsidized by the Government since 2015. Every year, our students compete for an invaluable 6-month-long volunteering engagement opportunity working in United Nations Agencies around Asia. The students provide humanitarian support in Southeast Asia and Central Asia for disaster risk reduction, health, education, SDG research and advocacy, environmental sustainability and climate change, etc.
It's usually difficult for organizations to create a big impact on society by working alone. Working with funding, there is a project cycle and a project end date. However, as we are working for the community, our work should be continuous. At the beginning of my assignment, I used to be hesitant to give suggestions or advice. It took time for me to learn the local situation and build confidence to actively participate in discussions with my team.