Bringing UNSW’s “Progress for All” strategy to life

Associate Professor Veronica Jiang is an equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) champion at UNSW Business School. Leading projects that make learning at UNSW more inclusive, she now has her sights set on an even bigger picture with her recent appointment as UNSW Business School’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Committee Chair.

The UNSW Business School SDG Committee sits under the UNSW Business School EDI Committee and is focused on aligning the Business School’s strategy with the UN’s SDG goals.

During her time as Chair, Veronica wants to bring faculty members from different disciplinary backgrounds together with industry, institutions, and communities while also aligning the Business School’s strategy and with UNSW’s overall strategy, Progress for All.

“The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are centred around four pillars: prosperity, people, planet and partnership.

We want to align our SDG commitments with the Business School’s initiatives and actions alongside UNSW’s overall Progress for All strategy, especially around the two focus areas of advancing social and economic prosperity and accelerating the transition to a sustainable society and the planet,” she says.

“We do this by organising events, initiatives and actions on behalf of the Business School that both contribute to the SDGs and raise awareness of their importance and what we all can do to make an impact.”

UNSW’s Business School was the first faculty to launch an SDG committee in 2022. Other faculties followed suit, and the Central UNSW Sustainable Development Goals Steering Committee was also created after that.

An opportunity for collaboration

Associate Professor Jiang has identified three initial goals as she steps into the role of SDG Committee Chair. The first is encouraging a more collaborative approach to the university’s EDI goals.

Previously, the committee focused on initiatives for the Business School, but she believes now is a good time to start collaborating with other faculties.

“We cannot reach the goals by ourselves. There are a lot of opportunities where we can collaborate and start thinking about what we can do together across faculties, but also with local communities,” she says.

“We have UNSW’s Parramatta Innovation Hub, where we can organise events and programs that connect more with communities in Western Sydney. There’s the engineering faculty, they’re researching in sustainable materials and mining, and the law faculty focusing on refugees and humanitarian aid.

There’s lots going on and many ways to work together.”

Embedding SDGs into Business education

Associate Professor Jiang’s second goal is to see more integration of the SDGs into education across the Business School. She knows it is already happening in some courses but wants to obtain the data to understand where and how.

“In Business courses, many of us have been talking about SDGs. I’ve already mapped coursework presentations and course data for the School of Marketing, looking at SDG education in marketing courses specifically.”

She found that in the 37 marketing course deliveries, 70% of the weeks of the term, teachers would mention something related to SDGs.

“We cover concepts and examples like Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9) and Economic Prosperity (SDG 8) because marketing courses talking about a lot of new products and consumer choices.

There’s also Good Health (SDG 3) because food is used a lot as marketing examples and we talk about consumer choice, healthy lifestyle culture and more sustainable food options. These SDG goals go hand in hand with teaching responsible business principles, so it was great to see them in our courses.”

But this type of information isn’t available at a faculty or university level. Yet!

“I want to change that. It’s important to show students how their learning is related to the SDGs and students find their learning more meaningful. Also, SDG education contributes to our UNSW SDG report, which impacts our The Higher Education (THE) SDG ranking. Being able to showcase all UNSW courses across faculties and how they relate to the SDGs would help UNSW improve its ranking.”

The Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings measure the progress of universities working to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). UNSW is currently ranked 7^th in the world out of 2,152 participating institutions, securing 11 top 100 and four top 10 places – our best result to date.

The University is also ranked second in the world for SDG 13 Climate Action for the second year running and rose to third in the world for SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation.

Mobilising students on SDG actions

Associate Professor Jiang’s third goal as Chair is to involve students in SDG actions and encourage their interactions with the Committee. She believes students are generally interested in contributing to a better world, but with a busy course load and other commitments, it’s hard for some to make this a priority.

“We’re thinking about having an SDG innovation hackathon or even asking students to run a consulting agency where they can advise small to medium businesses on how they can be more sustainable or work toward other SDG goals.

It’s just in the thinking stage at the moment but we definitely want to involve more students and industry partners in this area.”

“We have already seen strong engagement from our students through our 2025 Term 1 SDG O-Week Stall, with nearly 1,000 students wanting to learn more about the SDGs. We now want to capitalise on this engagement throughout the year.”

A passionate advocate for accessible learning

Associate Professor Jiang joined the Business School’s EDI committee in 2022, taking on the role of Academic Disability Advisor the same year. She had already been involved in a range of projects that aim to improve student access to learning, led by a passion for inclusiveness and embracing diversity.

This includes developing the Digital Accessibility Guides for Learning and a teaching toolkit for neurodiverse students to be released in 2025 as part of the Diversified project.

Since 2016, she joined several research groups led by Scientia Professor Shan Pan from UNSW Business School’s School of Information Systems and Technology Management, which focused on digital sustainability and the SDGs and also joined UNSW’s Disability Innovation Institute (DIIU). She received a grant from the DIIU and started a research journey around disability and virtual reality.

Veronica have produced the FT Responsible Business Education Award 2025 winning project, Diverse Horizons: VR for Transformative Inclusive Education. Also called ‘Riding with Amy’, it is an interactive 360 video VR experience that brings the world of a person with a disability to life.

This collaborative project between Veronica Jiang and UNSW’s Media Team created a powerful experience to educate students and build empathy for those with a disability.

All of this work is grounded in Veronica’s desire to help people and contribute to a better world.

And in her new position as SDG Committee Chair, it is another platform to raise awareness and bring people together and advocate for change.  

“As an academic, impact is not only about publishing research articles, it's also about making societal progress. The more people are taking actions about it, the more tangible outcomes and potential impact we can see.

I’m excited for what’s to come in this role, contributing to SDG actions and making an impact.