Increasingly employees and leaders of organisations, including commercial businesses are asking:

How do we make a positive difference to our world?

The United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a challenge and framework for moving towards a more equitable and sustainable world for all to share now and in the future.

The individual goals provide a focus for action, awareness raising, investment, reporting and measuring outcomes.

As a private commercial company, Spatial Vision empowers customers to generate actions and awareness with tools, information and advice.

By way of example, SV collaborated with Women’s Health Victoria to create and support the Women’s Health Atlas and a sexual and reproductive health services locator.

The Women’s Health Atlas freely enables anyone to find and understand an array of indicators of gender equity or inequity, for themes including: Mental Health; Violence; Avoidable Mortality.

The service locator is part of the 1800 My Options service where women can find sexual and reproductive clinics and specialist services across Victoria, which can otherwise be hard to find.

Women’s Health Victoria is a not-for-profit organisation that advocates for women across the state and works with a network of regional women’s health services.

Now let’s consider the adage, think global, act local.

When you apply an SDG lens to the work of Women’s Health Victoria, they clearly support Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being, particularly for women and girls, and Goal 5: Gender Equality – they are all about this.

On behalf of SV, I recently began a conversation with Dianne Hill, CEO of WHV on reporting against the SDGs, something they had not considered at the time.

Would alignment to reporting on the SDG’s change what they do? No, but it would elevate the significance of their work in a global context. By doing so, it may enhance their ability to attract investment.

Promotion may also encourage other jurisdictions in Australia or around the world to deliver similar information services.

SV and WHV have a memorandum of understanding in place so that any request to utilise or re-use the Atlas or service locator, will deliver a financial return to WHV to reinvest in their services. So promotion of the alignment of the Atlas and services locator to SDGs’ would not only deliver altruistic value, it could facilitate commercial value too.

SV and WHV are now working together to report on the SDG outcomes from the Atlas and service locator. This raises some very interesting questions. We can report on the outcomes through our own channels but:

1. How can we amplify the message and make more people and different organisations aware of it?
2. How can we spatially represent these women’s health outcomes so that they can be found and understood appropriately in a geographic context?
3. Finally, could we, the Australian spatial industry take a collective approach to raise awareness of the SDG’s and report on the difference we are making towards a more equitable and sustainable world?

This presentation forms part of an ongoing project undertaken by Spatial Vision to create further acknowledgement of and alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goal Agenda for 2030 for stakeholders within and beyond the spatial industry. For more information, please contact us.

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Access all episodes of ‘Making A Difference on the SDGs’ here >