Another Development Foundation is happy to announce partnership with UK-based Hard Rain Project – winner of prestigious UNESCO award on Education for Sustainable Development 2017. The amazing story of Hard Rain Project, as well as on the UNESCO award, is available on: www.hardrainproject.com

The partnership with Another Development Foundation is based on previous collaboration between Ingvar Rönnbäck – founder and chair of the board for the foundation and founder and CEO of ADEP – Another Development Perspective Ltd – and Hard Rain Project since 2010 in various events in The City of Umeå, Sweden and other places on different continents.

By working together with Hard Rain Project, Another Development Foundation will contribute to the necessary work on Education for Sustainable Development and on The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Through a Memorandum of Understanding between Another Development Foundation and Hard Rain Project the organizations will work with the new exhibition WHOLE EARTH? – A Citizen´s Guide to Sustainable Development Goals, as a foundation and tool for communication, learning, advocacy and change. Information on projects and activities – grounded in this partnership will be available on this website. However, the understanding and spirit in this new exhibition is captured in the following lines, written by Lloyd Timberlake who has partnered with Mark Edwards, the founder of Hard Rain Project and Dag Jonzon, Director of Hard Rain Project as an analyst, independent intellectual and a writer:

”Bob Dylan was more than 50 years ahead of the Sustainable Development Goals.

In 1962 he wrote a song called “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It painted a picture of failure, both of people and the planet we live on, “Where the people are many and their hands are all empty/Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters/… /Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten.”

At the end of his song he asked: “What’ll you do now…?”

It took governments and their people – or people and their governments – more than half a century to reply. But when it came, the reply was radical, perhaps even revolutionary. On 25 September 2015, 193 governments agreed to do 17 impossible things, from ending poverty and hunger to protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all. For each goal they set specific targets, all of which must be hit by 2030, if not sooner.

If taken seriously, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) change everything. The planet used to be divided in economists’ jargon into “developing” countries and “industrialised” nations. But the SDGs make all countries “developing countries” – developing new, low-carbon ways of heating, air-conditioning, getting around, manufacturing, farming and prospering. The SDGs challenge rich and poor countries alike.

Meeting the SDGs will require spectacular global co-operation by governments and the active support and encouragement of citizens, schools and universities around the world.

Will we take this opportunity to transform society and underpin security for all? Or will we be satisfied with gesture politics, setting goals we have no intention of meeting?”

These words from Lloyd Timberlake on the necessity of taking the SDGs seriously, is also a call to us at Another Development Foundation to do so.