SDGs Intelligence

About the project

SDGs Intelligence is an Erasmus+ small-scale partnership coordinated by Ecological Future Education (Latvia) with EMOTiC (Austria) and EPEKA (Slovenia). Running from March 2024 to March 2025, it set out to reconnect young people with sustainable action through conversations that stimulate creativity and critical thinking, and to help them bring the Sustainable Development Goals into their own local contexts.

Too often, learning about the SDGs is limited to slide presentations, abstract theory or feel-good slogans. For young people who feel overwhelmed by global challenges or put off by polarising climate activism, this creates distance rather than action. SDGs Intelligence takes a different route: it gives young people the right questions, not ready-made answers, and trusts them to find their own.

At its heart is the SDGs Cards Box, a participatory tool that prompts real dialogue on each of the 17 goals through ecological, social and economic lenses. The box holds 70 cards: 51 question cards (three for each goal), 9 solution-oriented cards and 10 support cards with instructions and extra context. Each card combines critical questions, data-backed prompts and contextual insights. The box is available in English, Latvian, German and Slovenian, and the SDGs Guidebook helps youth workers use it in youth centres, classrooms or outdoors.

From April to July 2024 the partners worked through an intensive co-design phase, using participatory methods such as the Reciprocal Maieutic Approach and persona profiling, so that the cards reflect young people's realities, language and aspirations. Youth workers from the three countries also joined a transnational training to learn how to use the cards in workshops and adapt them to different groups.

Local pilot workshops followed from September to December 2024. In Austria the cards were used in EMOTiC's Climate Lab, where a conversation about SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) led to a youth-led campaign for second-hand school supplies, reducing both waste and costs for families. In Latvia a group proposed "green corridors" to increase biodiversity in schoolyards, and at EPEKA's community hub in Slovenia young people, including Roma youth, debated economic sustainability and access to green jobs.

More than 50 young people took part directly, and through follow-up events, social media campaigns and wider community engagement the project reached more than 400 people. Insights from the pilots were used to improve the tools, which were also shared through the Erasmus+ and SALTO platforms. As one participant put it: "I always thought sustainability was something far away, for governments or scientists. Through this project, I realised how connected it is to my everyday life."

The Cards Box and the Guidebook are free to use and adapt under a Creative Commons licence, laying the foundation for more than 100 educators and youth workers to lead inclusive, action-driven conversations about sustainability with the young people they work with.