BC Working Group Gets United Nations RCE Status

Greetings and Happy New Year! Walking the Talk is kicking off 2010 with an exciting announcement. The group has just been formally designated the new United Nations Regional Centre for Expertise for Education on Sustainable Development (RCE) for the British Columbia (North Cascadia) region. Dr. David Zandvliet of SFU spearheaded this designation on behalf of Walking the Talk, and he received the official certificate of designation from the United Nations University on January 10, 2010.

The Regional Centre for Expertise concept was developed by the United Nations University in 2004. It promotes the development of a network of formal, non-formal and informal education and learning-related institutions mobilized to promote ESD at regional (sub-national) and local levels. RCEs aspire to achieve the goals of the UN Decade for Education on Sustainable Development (2005-2014) by translating its global objectives into the context of regional-local areas in which they operate.

Under the UN banner, we hope to continue to bring together and build on all the excellent work taking place in BC already – work that has made our region an educational world leader. Our efforts over the next five years will be focussed on making the last half of the UN DESD a continued success in our region. The new BC/North Cascadia RCE will be officially launched at the annual EECOM Conference at SFU, May 19-23. We hope Walking the Talk members will come out and help to celebrate the new UN designation and to dialogue with us about how the RCE can be most successful in fulfilling its mission and goals. Visit the EECOM site for more details about their national conference, and stay tuned to for more details about the new RCE.

Some RCE facts:

• There have been 74 RCEs designated worldwide since the start of the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) in 2005.

• BC/North Cascadia is only the eighth regional centre to be designated in North and Central America.

• The other seven North/Central American RCEs are Western Jalisco (Mexico), Grand Rapids and North Texas in the USA, and Canadian centres in Montreal, Greater Sudbury, Toronto and Saskatchewan.

• The BC/North Cascadia region is easily one of the largest and most geographically diverse regions in the world to be designated an RCE.

To find out more about the universal mission and work being carried out by RCE’s around the world, visit the RCE section of the UNU website. Three of Canada’s RCEs, Saskatchewan, Montreal, and Sudbury have websites dedicated to their work, and provide an excellent overview of some of the potential educational initiatives, research projects, and governance structures that the BC RCE could emulate. We look forward to beginning this new chapter in Walking the Talk's history!