Action Plan for Impacting Your Sustainable Development Goal

The assignment aims to provide students with a template to translate any brick of knowledge from their education and build a well-thought-out action plan that will have a larger impact than simply being aware of it. It's a plan to get students to translate awareness into action.

The project is the culminating exercise in the course. The 30 students are allowed to work in pairs or by themselves.

Using the article "Stop Raising Awareness Already" by Cristiano and Neimand and a six-step template, students create a plan to show how they apply the knowledge learned throughout the term to make a broader impact. The students are asked to very narrowly choose a single action they want a group of stakeholders to take and develop a multiple-step plan to accomplish the action. The students are required to select and justify a targeted stakeholder, develop an action, identify a messenger that can influence their targeted stakeholder to take the action, develop a sticky message relating the "ask" to the goal of the campaign, and document their key assumptions imbedded in their action plan.

Action Plan Template (Acrobat (PDF) 446kB May25 22)

A rubric was developed to assign values to the various parts of the action plan framework. The score for each section is based on how well the student answers the questions in the template and stitch them together into a coherent narrative.