SDGs Cards Box: Turning Global Goals into Conversations and Action

The Sustainable Development Goals can sometimes feel distant from everyday youth work. Seventeen goals, global targets and complex challenges are important to understand, but simply presenting them does not always lead to meaningful discussion. The SDGs Cards Box was created to make these topics easier to explore through questions, discussion, collaboration and practical activities.

Developed within the SDGs Intelligence project, the Box is designed as a flexible educational resource rather than one fixed workshop. It contains 72 cards: 51 Goal Cards exploring the social, economic and ecological dimensions of all 17 SDGs, 7 Resource Cards providing background information, 5 Overview Cards explaining the tool, and 9 Solution Cards introducing methods that facilitators can combine with the SDG content. This means a youth worker can use the same set of cards for a short discussion, a role-playing activity, a full workshop or as a starting point for young people to develop their own sustainability initiatives.

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Pick a goal, but don't stop at the definition

The Goal Cards are not designed only to explain what SDG 3, SDG 10 or SDG 13 means. They introduce real-world challenges and use open questions to encourage participants to connect global sustainability issues with their own communities and experiences. The aim is to move from “What is this SDG?” towards “What does this actually look like around us, and what could we do about it?” The cards intentionally address sustainability through its social, economic and ecological dimensions, helping participants see that the SDGs are interconnected rather than 17 separate topics. 

The Solution Cards add another layer. Instead of always discussing the Goal Cards in the same way, facilitators can combine them with methods such as Role Playing, World Café, SWOT Analysis, Collaborative Brainstorming or Challenge Mapping. This makes the Box particularly useful for youth workers because the method can change depending on the group, available time and learning objective.

For example, participants can take the perspectives of young people, policymakers, NGOs or businesses and negotiate possible responses to an SDG challenge. In another session, they might analyse an issue through SWOT, brainstorm community solutions or develop an action plan. The cards provide the starting point, while the facilitator and participants shape where the activity goes.

Tested in different youth work realities

One of the most valuable parts of developing the SDGs Cards Box was seeing how differently it could be used in practice. Across the project and additional implementation activities, the methodology reached young people and youth workers through local workshops, online activities and other Erasmus+ learning environments. The overall implementation reached more than 327 participants, including 209 young people and 118 youth workers, across activities involving participants from 18 countries. 

The cards were tested with school students, youth workers and international groups and adapted to very different themes. In one activity, young people used SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being and SDG 13 Climate Action to compare challenges and green policies in their countries. Participants highlighted that the open questions helped generate interesting discussions and made the SDG content easier to work with. 

In another implementation, 32 youth workers selected an SDG and used it as the foundation for designing their own green initiative. Instead of only discussing sustainability, groups developed activities, considered sustainability strategies and thought about the potential impact of their ideas. The cards were also used for role-playing around climate action and multi-stakeholder decision-making, SWOT analysis of inequalities, school-based sustainability activities and discussions about community challenges. 

The same cards can work online

An important lesson from the implementation was that the Box does not necessarily need to be physically printed. During online piloting, participants worked in breakout rooms with digital Solution Cards, adapting activities such as Role Playing, Collaborative Brainstorming and Challenge Mapping to an online environment. The experience showed that the cards could still support discussion, critical thinking and collaboration when participants were connecting from different countries. 

This flexibility is also built into the User Guide. Facilitators can send selected cards through messaging platforms, display them on screen or distribute them to breakout groups. For repeated use, one practical suggestion is to create digital folders containing cards for particular sessions or themes, making it easier to prepare activities without searching through the complete Box each time. 

One Box, many possibilities

For youth workers, perhaps the biggest advantage of the SDGs Cards Box is that you do not have to use all of it. If your activity is about climate change, select the relevant cards. If your group is discussing inequality, health or responsible consumption, build a session around those topics. If you want participants to debate, add Role Playing. If you want them to analyse their community, try SWOT Analysis. If you want ideas from the whole group, choose a collaborative method.

The implementation activities showed that the cards can work with young people and youth workers, in schools and youth projects, face-to-face and online, and as both a discussion starter and a tool for developing concrete initiatives. Rather than providing participants with ready-made answers to sustainability challenges, the Box gives them something more useful: a structured way to ask questions, compare perspectives and develop their own solutions.

The complete SDGs Cards Box and Practical Implementation Guide are available in English, Latvian, German and Slovenian and can be downloaded and adapted for youth work and educational activities. 

Explore and download the SDGs Intelligence Cards Box.

Erasmus+ Small scale partnership

SDGs Intelligence

Project No.  2023-3-LV02-KA210-YOU-000183294

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.