Let's Talk Human Rights

By Tony Talbott

It’s been a good year for sustainability and rights at UD. Coming on the heels of hosting an amazing global conference on decolonization and development for Africa last November, we convened a working group that compiled and published a report using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to gauge living conditions for Black Daytonians. This work is part of a larger initiative–the Black Audit Project supporting the work of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (stay tuned for more info). We also are moving full speed ahead on our commitment to the Laudato Si Action Plan and the seven Laudato Si Goals, which highly compliment the SDGs [link]. That leads us to the main topic I want to discuss here, our 2024 Communication on Engagement with the UN Global Compact (COE). [link] 

The UN Global Compact is often considered the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world, with over 24,000 participants across 167 countries. UD joined as a non-business member in 2017 and recently submitted its third required biannual COE.  As a Catholic, Marianist institution, we initially joined the compact to demonstrate our strong commitment to sustainability and human rights and the SDGs. Building on that commitment,  for the 2024 COE, we decided to do something a bit different: an inventory of UD activities mapped to the SDGs down to the target level when possible. 

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development introduced the seventeen SDGs as a road map for global transformation to achieve social justice, inclusive economic activity, and environmental protection, now and for future generations. The goals are based on real world targets and measurable indicators to track progress. It's a comprehensive approach spanning a wide range of universally-applicable issues and actions. We wanted to see how well UD stacked up to the SDG challenge.Known as a Voluntary Local Review (VLR), the point of the exercise is to measure the localized progress toward achieving the SDGs. 

Building on almost a decade of work with the global goals, I developed an experiential learning project for my SDG class (SEE 325) in Fall of 2023. The students spent the last part of the semester applying what they learned about the SDGs to the UD context. They reviewed UD webpages, reports, news articles, and other sources, looking for programs and activities that aligned with specific SDGs and targets. Over the winter break, I reviewed and organized their work and then, in the Spring semester, one of our HRC interns, Elyce Aldridge (‘24), and I drafted the report. Our talented HRC team reviewed, edited, and developed a sleek design, then, after the president and provost reviewed it, we published it on the UN Global Compact website.

This initial VLR sets a baseline for measuring our engagement with the SDGs and, by extension, the 10 Principles of the Global Compact. While it’s not a complete inventory, the results show a comprehensive level of engagement with all 17 SDGs across all UD functions (academics, scholarship, operations, and community engagement). Each goal has 8-12 targets making 169 in total. We were able to identify specific UD programs or activities for 49 of the targets or 29%.This is a high level of engagement considering that the SDGs are primarily intended for national and international action. We are proud of our efforts and the commitment from University leadership to support this critically important work. We planto continue this work of bringing the global to the local, and hope to expand this report and track changes of engagement over time.  

Tony has lectured at many different colleges and universities and has taught in the Political Science Department and Human Rights Studies Program at the University of Dayton since 2007. He has taught, lectured and published on a variety of subjects dealing with global politics, Asian politics, and human rights, and is currently teaching one of the nation’s first undergraduate courses on human trafficking. He is a credentialed Not For Sale Campaign, Citizen Investigator of human trafficking and a founding member of Abolition Ohio, the Miami Valley’s Anti-Human Trafficking Coalition.

Tony is very active in the modern abolition movement. He chairs Abolition Ohio’s general meetings and heads two subcommittees, Awareness, Education and Training and Research. He serves on the Ohio Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Commission and works closely with various other anti-human trafficking agencies around the state. He speaks regularly on issues dealing with human trafficking throughout Ohio and the Midwest.