Consortiums for Good

Dr. Carr-Jordan is the Head of Social Impact for EdPlus at ASU and the Executive Director of ASU ADVANCE. She has spent nearly two decades in higher education where her roles included faculty, chair, director, and dean. She drives strategy to architect, execute, and scale high-impact initiatives with a focus on at-risk populations, diversity, equity, ethics, and interdisciplinarity. A Flinn-Brown Fellow, Dr. Carr-Jordan is on the board of Special Olympics AZ, the Developmental Disabilities Advisory Council, and SeaTrust Institute. She is a member of UN Women and a signatory of the Global Compact. Erin was the CEO of a research firm and a tech company. She coauthored regulation in multiple states and has legislative consulting experience in environmental safety, public health, and human development. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from ASU and a certificate from MIT. She was a delegate at COP21 and is a Senior Sustainability Scholar.

Global challenges that threaten people and the planet persist. Current approaches to addressing the global goals are inefficient, siloed, redundant, difficult to scale, and unsustainable long-term. More can be done to catalyze the knowledge, skills, and networks from academic institutions to meaningfully move the needle. Using the framework of the SDGs, Consortiums for Good (CFG) leverages novel impact technology to create an ecosystem within higher education to advance coordinated, interdisciplinary, multi-sector efforts to solve the world's most pressing challenges. CFG enables holistic understanding of the current state of affairs for any goal. Updated in real-time through the ingestion of relevant and vetted databases, the tool includes a notification system, an equality index, regional comparisons, as well as areas of strength, weakness, and opportunities for greatest impact. While the pilot focus is SDG5 and gender equality, the tool is designed for use with all SDGs.

In 2015,193 countries committed to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG5, Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. Only 8 countries mandate gender equality. 95% of countries still have laws that discriminate against women. 

Women are disproportionately impacted during crisis and conflicts.  Violence against women costs $1.5T annually. The impact from COVID-19 on women and girls is devastating and threatens to reverse progress. Nearly half the American population is out of work. Women hold more roles at risk from automation and too few have the skills to compete in emerging fields. Women do more service and unpaid work and lack access to capital.

According to McKinsey, at current rates of progress it will take 257 years to achieve economic equity and 212 years to close the gender pay gap. We will not close the gender gap in our lifetimes. Between $12m and $28m could be added to the global economy if equity were achieved. Nearly one third of companies in the private sector still have no women on their boards. 

It is a social and economic imperative that we address gender inequality. 

Consortiums for Good (CFG) leverages four primary pillars; people, place (virtual lab and ASU), process (social-impact AI, lifecycle approach, intelligent teaming), and ecosystem (local, national, global) to build, support, and scale projects for greatest impact. As impact becomes increasingly more important it is of paramount importance that universities and their networks leverage their collective organizational capacity, their considerable expertise, and their unrivaled innovative spirit to create a purpose and equity-driven approach to addressing the global goals.

Through novel social impact AI and intelligent teaming, the CFG enables identification of, and response to, critical social challenges with unprecedented speed and efficiency. The tools are designed to identify gaps, opportunities for greatest impact, and interdisciplinary groups of people passionate about that subject to work together to identify, design, launch, scale, and measure impact. As gaps are identified, the core team will explore avenues of research, identify and engage contributing experts, scope potential solutions, and identify challenges that may inhibit success.

CFG uses the SDGs as a framework to produce high-impact outputs including new knowledge, policy and legislative change, research and development, product development, publication and presentations, training, future work, and contributions to education. 

Inequality looks different depending on where you live and who you are. 

Gender equity fundamentally impacts whether economies and societies thrive and should be thought of as a leverage point to address poverty, health, education, climate change, innovation and infrastructure, work and more. To make large-scale and meaningful impact, our team will continue working with our partners, both local to global, to assess needs and measure success. Through our technology tools and qualitative methods we will measure regulatory, policy, and legislative change, changes in numbers of women in leadership positions and representation on boards, behavioral change and more. In addition to working with community and local partners we will continue to work with local and global legislators, multi-sector/multi-national partners, community organizations and NGOs and governments. Our team will work collectively with the communities we are hoping to serve to ensure their voices are guiding our actions. Central to the CFG model is that successes are measured, that we are nimble, that the technology is leveraged to enable the work of humans, that ethics is woven throughout every process, and that the community we are serving is engaged throughout the life-cycle of every project. 

Like Elevate, Consortiums for Good is driven by innovators, activists and problem-solvers who are passionate about leveraging their skills to positively impact humanity.

In 2015, I attended COP21 in Paris. While there I witnessed the power of collaboration to overcome self-interest and the indelible commitment of global leaders and their communities to protect people and the planet. I wanted to be part of that. I became a signatory of the global compact and have participated in UN and Global Compact events since. 

ASU encourages innovation and creativity. As Head of Social Impact I have the privilege of working with a diverse group of talented people on a variety of public values projects. In each, the goal was to do the most good, for the largest number of people, for the longest amount of time. It was clear that more could be done if we amplify and replicate processes, leverage technology strategically, and bring people together based on their personal passions. 

I wrote the first draft of the CFG in 2018. Since then more than 50 reviewers from diverse disciplines including public policy, economics, engineering, data science, public health, entrepreneurship, informatics, education, political science, philanthropy, psychology, climate, international affairs, social design, entrepreneurship and innovation, and law have reviewed, provided feedback, and signed on to the project. 

I have spent the overwhelming majority of my adult life fighting for equity in the human experience. As the mother of four children I want them to experience a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. I also want them to see what it looks like to work hard, to persist, and to believe in yourself and your ideas. I want them to be optimistic and to know that the power of humanity is incredible. I am excited for them to see that when we work collaboratively, there is little that is out of reach and we can achieve meaningful impact. 

My background is diverse and includes work in higher education, public health, public policy, activism, business and technology. During my fifteen years in higher education I have led large departments, managed diverse teams of faculty and staff, secured multimillion dollars of funding for impact projects, and successfully taken projects from ideation to market. 

ASU creates a space where collaboration is encouraged and the CFG can thrive. ASU is committed to using its institutional capacity to move the needle on the global goals. In 2019 ASU ranked #1 in the US and #5 in the world by THE Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. 

Our team is well-versed in navigating multi-sector and multi-national relationships. Building relationships to amplify impact is woven into the infrastructure of the university. One of the greatest parts about this project is the fact that we are diverse in so many ways. We come from diverse disciplines, from diverse ethnicities, we are gender diverse, and we are age diverse. We create an ecosystem where the contributions of everyone carry equal weight and everyone is valued. Each of our core members is an expert in their respective field. Our collective expertise is among the projects greatest strengths. 

ASU is a large and complex institution. It took a long time to make sure the project was well-designed and that the right team was engaged. Part of our work includes our Social Impact AI tool. The team who was building the MVP is now subsumed by COVID-19 projects. COVID work takes priority so we shifted our focus to other parts of the project until that team can jump back in. We are in the process of completing a video series that will launch at the high level political forum. 

I have four children. In 2011 I took them to an indoor playground on the way to school. We were running early. I noticed that the playground was disgusting, was in disrepair, and was covered in profanity. I let the manager know and left. I went back the next day only to find nothing had improved. The following week I looked again and this time took a video and swabbed; my best friend is a microbiologist. The swab came back with dangerous levels of bacterial growth which we reported. Curious whether the problem was unique to that location, or if it was common for indoor playgrounds, I launched a study to investigate AZ. I found the same problem frequently. I partnered with a lab to process the samples and started posting videos from each visit. Over the course of the next two years I tested sites in 20+ states. It is the largest study of its kind. We launched a successful awareness campaign and there is now a textbook chapter written about our work. I testified before congress and coauthored regulation in several states. It is for that organization that I am a UNGC signatory.

The CFG will be positioned as a mechanism within ASU to address the world’s greatest challenges. ASU is a mission-driven research university dedicated to continuous institutional transformation. Grounded in scientific discovery, research excellence, collaboration, and innovation, ASU is uniquely well-positioned to house the CFG so that it can respond to critical social challenges with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and an eye towards scale.

In the next five years we want to expand and be working on all 17 goals. We would like to see correlation between the work of the CFG and positive changed on the targets and indicators of the global goals. 

We need funding to hire staff and to train and test the models. We also need funding to continue the awareness campaign and measure our success. We suspect we will have policy barriers to overcome.

Initial funding will support leadership staff, research, and piloting of the AI tools. Funding will be saught throughout the tenure of the program. Revenue will be generated from grants, awards, IP, and consulting and the CFG is expected to be self-sustaining by year three.