Session 1 | January 24, 2025 | In-Person Retreat
The inaugural SDGs-TKC Community of Practice retreat brought together researchers, students, staff, and community partners to establish shared values, surface tensions, and explore how transdisciplinary knowledge co-production can address complex Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) challenges at the University of Toronto and beyond. Through interactive exercises and facilitated discussions, participants examined barriers and facilitators to action, reflected on power and equity, and engaged deeply with “wicked problems” such as food security, technology, decolonization, and institutional culture.
Session Summary
- Shared Values & Purpose: Participants identified care, kindness, justice, active listening, and accountability as foundational CoP values, while naming the need for deeper self-reflexivity, power analysis, and anti-oppressive, decolonial frameworks.
- Barriers to Action: Structural constraints within the neoliberal university, time and resource limitations, misaligned incentives, and systemic inequities were identified as key challenges to advancing SDG-aligned work.
- Facilitators for Change: Relationship-building, allyship, transparency, affirmative action, and intentional power-sharing were highlighted as critical enablers of meaningful co-production.
- Technology & SDGs: Participants explored the promise and risks of AI and technology, emphasizing ethical, community-centered use that avoids reinforcing colonial or extractive systems.
- Wicked Problems & Systems Thinking: Through collaborative activities, participants examined interconnected challenges including food justice, sustainability metrics, decolonizing knowledge, labour rights, and responsible innovation.
- Reimagining Knowledge & Impact: Strong calls emerged to move beyond traditional academic metrics toward experiential learning, qualitative narratives, and community-defined measures of success.
It is important for me to state that the whole retreat was valuable in many ways. The most valuable part of the session was the second half, where we discussed wicked problems and "worked" on it collectively to develop the problem statement. It felt engaging, where you got heard and accepted. It allowed for thinking, and discussing your ideas, with live feedback from other team members. I really liked how we were able to build off of each other's ideas. The synergy was exciting and full of hope. I also liked the hands-on way of doing it, with the chart paper and markers and sticky notes... I also liked the padlet [activity]. It was fun to see what everyone is thinking and saying on the big screen. It was helpful to see that diverse ideas can coexist together, and motivated me to be original. Overall, the interactive form of this workshop was welcoming. It felt like a safe space to me, where I could really focus on co-creating and expressing myself as part of a whole.
CoP Member