Powerful Partnerships: Collaborating to Achieve UN SDGs

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an urgent call to action to help people and the planet—and projects aligned to those goals require strong collaboration with stakeholders, whether they’re government agencies, teachers or farmers. We discuss this with:

Jenny Buccos, CEO of EXPLR and co-director of the National STEM Festival, New York City: Buccos discusses how she and her team worked with the U.S. Department of Education along with corporate and philanthropic partners to bring the National STEM Festival to life. She also talks about the skills she leaned on to build stronger relationships with partners, the festival’s future and how STEM can help make a big impact on UN SDGs.

Simon Dyer, CEO, Virtual Irrigation Academy, Sunshine Coast, Australia: Dyer shares VIA’s history and how small-scale farmers, their communities and governments are using VIA’s tech and the data it generates to make informed irrigation decisions. He also talks about the importance of face-to-face conversations with stakeholders, cultivating partners within the communities projects are happening in, and his biggest lessons learned from collaborating with stakeholders.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals chart a course for organizations around the world to address some of the most urgent and impactful challenges. And for projects to deliver on the vision requires strong collaboration among stakeholders—from government agencies to community members. Today we’re highlighting how two project teams did just that.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified^®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, range from boosting access to education to erasing poverty and hunger. And there’s an enormous breadth of projects addressing SDGs. In fact, PMI’s 2024 Most Influential Projects list focused exclusively on SDG initiatives—amplifying projects that aim to tackle issues such as food insecurity in Nairobi and water shortages at schools in Mexico. Visit pmi.org/podcast and click on the transcript for this episode to see the full list.

Today we’ll explore how two project leaders embraced collaboration and stakeholder management to push their initiatives forward, beginning with Jenny Buccos in New York City. Jenny is CEO of EXPLR, a streaming service offering educational content for preteens and teenagers. She’s also the co-director of the National STEM Festival—a gathering that’s designed to inspire and engage students interested in science, technology and math. The event also showcases National STEM Challenge winners—and could inspire future Challenge national champions.

Jenny and her colleague, Kari Byron, former host of the hit TV show MythBusters, worked with the U.S. Department of Education to organize the first festival. It’s now in its second year under EXPLR’s leadership. We spoke with Jenny about the event and its impact.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Jenny, thanks for joining us. I’m excited to hear about the National STEM Festival. Tell me about what drew you to take on this project. And then let’s talk about how you and your co-director have approached the work: How are you pulling it off? And what’s been a major challenge?

JENNY BUCCOS
I’ve always worked with kids. So getting kids to participate, to submit applications, and getting teachers to get involved in that, that was going to be the easy part. I knew from the second we got the yes, like, [it’s an] amazing thing to have the federal government sort of saying, “Yes, you are the people we want to be in partnership with.” But I also knew the challenges that that was going to come with, that the next few months of my life were going to be contract negotiations, MOUs (memorandums of understanding), understanding ethical policy with the government, who you can take money from, how you can communicate in a way that is above board for the government. And then just, how do you make this, like, truly bipartisan, where everyone wants to be involved in it?

But when I say yes to something, I’m going to do it to 110%. And the more people say, “Well, you can’t pull that off,” or “You can’t do it,” the more motivation I have to make something amazing. It was a lot at once, because we had no blueprint for it. I immediately had to start with, “Okay, how do we work with the government?” So you have one set of stakeholders. How do we work with our funders to make this possible? Because the government did not provide funding for this. So that was entirely on us. Government relations is one job, funding is one job, and then education stakeholders is another job.

The [National STEM] Challenge is what got the kids to the festival. So there had to be a process of kids applying and projects being reviewed. We had to build that from scratch, too. And not just, how do we get kids to submit their projects, but the legality of running a competition and the logistical hurdles in getting something off the ground that impacts more than 50 million kids in a country, with no blueprint, definitely was quite a challenge. But once that framework is there, it’s easy to replicate it year to year, and then scale that up regionally, outside of the U.S., globally. And that’s the vision.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
One of the biggest partners for the first festival was the U.S. Department of Education. How did you navigate working with the agency?

JENNY BUCCOS
The benefit of working with the Department of Education is, obviously, if you want to run a national education event, being in partnership with the highest organization—saying, “Yes, this is our partner, and we trust them to execute this”—gives us a lot of credibility and allows us to go to schools and out-of-school learning programs and STEM stakeholders and potential funders. So that was really, really valuable from the start. And I don’t think in year one, being a small company, we ever could have pulled that off without that sort of seal of approval.

But where we got held up in this process, and in the MOU, was specifically the Challenge portion. Because these are minors, and collecting data from them became hugely problematic. So immediately it became clear that we had to sever the Challenge portion and keep that just under EXPLR, and then everything festival-related—the physical event, any outreach—could be in partnership with the government.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
You also had additional sponsors, such as private corporations and other organizations. What were those partnerships like?

JENNY BUCCOS
So the government, in terms of funding the festival, had to approve every single potential corporate sponsor and philanthropic sponsor. And that could take anywhere between three and four weeks just to get a yes to even talk to those people. That ties into government ethics. So trying to convince people that they just needed to be part of the Challenge if they didn’t clear ethics with the government, or trying to convince people that it was truly bipartisan in nature, I think those were some of the most challenging things to get around with our corporate funders.

Last year the scope of the project was largely driven by what the Department of Education was legally and ethically allowed to do. It meant things like, you couldn’t rank sponsors as platinum, gold, silver. Everyone had to be on equal footing, which was not great for all the sponsors. But they understood when you explained to them that that’s what this was. But from the Challenge perspective of the student submissions, it was fantastic. Because we had, like, 50 organizations who supplied us with C-level executives and chief scientists and experts and engineers and former astronauts that would review these kids’ projects, which is a lot to manage in terms of delivery and timelines. But what an amazing thing, to have 50 companies standing up and volunteering and supporting and mentoring the youth in our country. And I think that’s a really great way to engage people in virtual volunteer opportunities. So that was a huge undertaking for us, to get to those roughly 1,000 volunteers.

Leaning on time management and stakeholder engagement to build partnerships

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s an interesting hurdle—you want these companies to be sponsors and participate, but they may have to do so in a way they didn’t expect. How did you convince companies to get involved with the festival, even with some strict parameters, and keep the main purpose—the kids—in focus?

JENNY BUCCOS
I think communication is key to get people across the line on that. Because I’ve been working with youth for so long, it is my passion. It is my life’s work. And I lead with my passion. “This is why it’s important to me. This is why it should be important to you. This is the return on impact you’re going to get, as well as the return on investment.” I think not emailing people and taking time, which almost killed me from a health perspective, but being transparent at every step of the process with our first-year funders was essential. For a lot of our big people, they had my WhatsApp. They would text me. We had weekly standing calls with almost all of our funders. So we were very transparent in the process, and I think people will give you a lot of wiggle room when you’re transparent. Because we didn’t know going in that there were going to be so many hurdles with the federal government. We dual-tracked this. We were planning the festival and still trying to sign the MOU, which took almost 90 days. So people were funding us while we were still trying to work out what the parameters exactly looked like. So that communication and transparency was key for the whole phase.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
What were the particular skills that you found yourself leaning on to strengthen that engagement with stakeholders, to build the broadest possible partnership?

JENNY BUCCOS
My background is I studied Shakespeare in school. But my first job was at an investment bank as a project manager for two and a half years in an HR division. And that gave me the foundation for everything I have ever needed professionally for the last 25 years. Time management is a huge, huge skill that I needed for this. Understanding how to make sure that your stakeholders have a literal seat and voice at the table is something that I needed from day one, and then just really being able to manage multiple personalities. From like a top-down perspective, those were the main skills: budgeting, stakeholder analysis and stakeholder perspective, and time management.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
We have these multiple-stakeholder groups, right? What did you hear from them in terms of how they perceived the impact on students? Any themes that surprised you or were gratifying, instructive, any of the above?

JENNY BUCCOS
Sure, [there were] a couple things that we heard over and over again. I kept telling everyone who was coming to this, “The level of innovation and creativity that you are going to see will blow your mind.” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve been to science fairs.” The resounding message that I heard is, “I feel hopeful for the future. I feel like these kids have it. I feel inspired. I feel reinvigorated to go back to my job knowing that people are working on some of the biggest issues facing our planet and humanity.” And for that to come from like a 13- or 14-year-old is extraordinary. One of the things that we are most proud of, is if you were selected to represent your state as a National STEM Champion, we secured sponsorships and donations and grants that enabled every child who was selected to have no financial barriers to participation. So that meant your hotel, your travel, shipping your project, that was taken care of. And that led to us having 57% of our participants from low-income, or Title I, schools, as they’re referred to in the United States. Which really shapes the narrative of who belongs in STEM and who can contribute to STEM—that it’s not just for the kids that have all the opportunities, but it’s also for under-resourced and underestimated communities. And everyone who attended noticed that, that these were different kids. They were from different communities. No child should face financial barriers for wanting to participate in a middle school or high school science fair or competition. That was designed from the start, that we were going to do that and provide this opportunity to as many kids as possible, particularly kids that don’t get this opportunity.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s awesome. So now, what is next besides just running it back? How will this thing evolve going into year two?

JENNY BUCCOS
So we’re expanding it out. The kids had three days last year. We’re expanding it out to five days this year. A lot of times, at the request of elected officials that weekend that we were in [Washington,] D.C. last year saying, “I’d really like to meet my constituent that won.” There isn’t a moment in the schedule for these kids. So we really looked at what these kids wanted to get out of the D.C. experience. So we’ve expanded that out for them. And the other thing we’ve added is a digital component—an on-demand component—and going back to sort of our core skill set that is available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And we’re calling that initiative Office Hours. It is interviewing people with cool STEM jobs that you never knew existed, and what is their career path? How did they get to where they were? What challenges did they overcome? What are the core skill sets they need to succeed in their role, and how do they see that changing in the future, with things like AI and automation? It’s running on our platform, but we also have a great partnership with LabXchange at Harvard University, which allows us to use the STEM Festival and EXPLR to reach and impact millions of people in the United States and around the world. That’s the U.S. version, and we’re also looking to expand this. Genius knows no boundaries. So how do we start to take this blueprint and concept to other regions? We’re specifically looking at the Gulf countries and Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa. Recently during the UN General Assembly, we talked to some people in Nigeria, Armenia, Denmark, that are all interested in replicating what we’ve done.

How STEM can help teams achieve UN SDGs

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Zooming out: Why is this sort of STEM cultivation important? This episode is focused on projects that are in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and I’m interested in how you think about this project and what you’re trying to achieve in terms of those global aims.

JENNY BUCCOS
When we’re trying to address the Sustainable Development Goals, there are a few things we need to keep top of mind. First of all, about a third of the population is under 25 years old. So getting kids to solve some of the problems that we’re trying to solve with the Sustainable Development Goals is absolutely critical. When that’s a third of the planet, they have to be involved. So things like science fairs, science competitions, science education helps them understand some of the problems and then apply practical scientific knowledge or the engineering design process to start to address those. That doesn’t matter where you are. That could be the U.S. National STEM Festival, or anywhere. But we need kids thinking about these targets we’re trying to hit, and how they might be able to solve them, not necessarily on a global stage, but how can they just positively impact their community?

I also think when we’re looking at potentially expanding globally, that’s addressing several Sustainable Development Goals. Not just through the kids’ projects, because that is one of the criteria—how does your project positively impact people’s lives, the planet, or your community? So that in itself is a call for youth to solve the biggest problems of our time. But I think if we’re looking to expand this globally, obviously we’re addressing quality education. Because we’re providing these materials online, we’re providing the framework to help drive STEM education globally. All you need is a mobile phone, and it’s quite easy to translate into multiple languages now.

I think we’re putting kids on a pathway or at least opening their eyes. So I like to say: inspire, prepare, employ. I think the festival—both in the U.S. and as we expand globally—we are both inspiring and preparing them for career pathways, so that’s addressing economic development and job opportunities. So those I think are the two key things that we can sort of drive through the initiatives we’re working on, and hopefully with global partners, to expand them out.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Before we continue, are you enjoying this episode? Please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show.

Now let’s shift our STEM-related discussion to how teams are using technology to equip farmers with tools that can help them water crops more intelligently. Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle spoke to Simon Dyer, the CEO of Virtual Irrigation Academy, a nonprofit that’s leaning into data to reduce water use while increasing food production. Simon is in Australia’s Sunshine Coast, and the company has offices in Australia and South Africa.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

HANNAH LABELLE
Simon, let’s start our conversation with just a quick overview. Tell us a little bit about Virtual Irrigation Academy, or VIA, and the technology that the company has created to help farmers make informed decisions about irrigation.

SIMON DYER
Virtual Irrigation Academy was created by Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, and the primary scientist there was a guy called Dr. Richard Stirzaker. So he’s the founder and the driving force behind VIA. Richard’s had a passion for agriculture and particularly a passion for smallholder agriculture for a really long period of time. How can we help these farmers to grow more food, to improve their livelihoods, to release themselves from poverty? And it really came down to this thing of, technology is helpful, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of the solution in this space. They lack the information to make better decisions than what they do now. And so that’s really been the driving force. We’re not just about technology. We’re about this learning and information and how do we make better decisions in this space.

Really what’s been invented and been developed over more than 10 years now is what we call the chameleon soil moisture sensor. And this is a sensor that’s buried in the ground. It’s attached to a light. That light provides a color output to the farmer—blue is wet soil, green is moist soil and red is dry soil. These are indicators of how thirsty the plant is. We’re not measuring moisture content in and of itself. What we’re measuring is actually how hard it is to get water out of the soil. It works in all soil types. This is really the breakthrough in the way that it can provide structured and easily understandable communication and information for farmers and for other stakeholders in the industry. Farmers can communicate and can discuss between themselves what they’re seeing in a relevant and a meaningful way. They can discuss with extension workers or with government, or with NGO (non-governmental organization) partners, or whoever that is in a way that makes sense. We have really made this effort to make this point of difference around, how do you actually foster this communication within this sector and foster this kind of idea of ongoing, people-centered learning around: “Okay, what are we seeing? Why are we seeing it? How is what I’m seeing different from what you are seeing? How do we compare this? And how do we collectively learn together and develop and grow and improve what we’re trying to do?”

HANNAH LABELLE
Let’s dive into this governance project that VIA kicked off in 2023. Like you said, tech is only part of it. It’s really the information that is a big driver. So tell us a little bit about the governance project’s goal, how it’s going to deliver positive impact to these smallholder farmers and, in turn, their communities.

SIMON DYER
The project really kicked off in the last couple of years. The background work for that goes back for quite some period of time, particularly with our work and the research work that was done in Malawi in collaboration with the government of Malawi, with their Ministry of Agriculture and the various departments under that. And it really came out of them identifying the need for improving water use efficiency and improving essentially the return on investment for what’s being invested into their country and into their agricultural system by donors from all over the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested into Malawi and into lots of other countries into improving irrigation in particular, or providing irrigation infrastructure. And they obviously had been working with us and identified this idea of actually monitoring and being able to feed that information back into the government to help the government make better policy decisions, make better decisions around the allocation of resources. That information [is] helping to make decisions that don’t affect single farmers—they now affect whole regions and whole communities at a time.

HANNAH LABELLE
So how are government agencies or other organizations using the data gathered by the sensors? How is that data making a bigger impact than just a farmer-by-farmer basis?

SIMON DYER
It gives the government the ability to, one, aggregate data regardless of where that’s coming from. You can make a comparison between a sensor in one location versus a sensor in another location, regardless of whether that’s in the same soil type, in the same country, in the same continent. And so this is where at, from a government level, the power really comes into it. We’ll keep using Malawi as the example of that. There’s thousands of government extension offices all over Malawi that are all helping farmers and providing advice to farmers on all kinds of things, irrigation included, in terms of how should they water their crops better, what’s the water requirement for their different crops and all those kinds of things. Where our sensors are used in those contexts then allows a higher-level view from the government. Okay, what’s happening in the southern part of Malawi? Okay, they’re growing maize. This is the way that they’ve been irrigating that maize. And this is the profile that comes through from the sensor, and the information that comes through in the sensor from that one. Okay, how does that compare to farmers growing the same crop in the central part of Malawi, or in the northern part of Malawi?

This then allows them to go, okay, how do we identify best practice? Or how do we identify areas where intervention and additional training and things are required in that? How do we find a way of identifying that, and then allocating resources to improve that—either to take what’s best practice being used somewhere and spread that around somewhere else, or find areas where intervention is needed? Or they might be able to identify areas where, oh, actually, something’s gone wrong here. It looks like the irrigation system is broken for this part of a scheme, and we can see that through the data.

The power of face-to-face interactions with stakeholders—and embracing community partners

HANNAH LABELLE
So there’s a lot of stakeholders involved in this—from the farmers themselves to their communities to these government agencies. How do you build relationships with, and build buy-in from, all of these stakeholders? And how does that relationship-building differ from stakeholder to stakeholder?

SIMON DYER
It takes a lot of time and a lot of work. The engagement with those stakeholders—from the farmers all the way through to the government ministers and decision makers, directors of government departments that are in there, and other ones, private sector ones, donors, NGOs, all those sorts of things that come in there. There’s cultural and tribal things that all come into there, too. You’ve got to navigate all of them, that’s the reality of it. And if you don’t engage with and include all of those people, your project pretty quickly falls over.

Nothing beats that face-to-face interaction, and nothing beats just sticking it out and taking the time to be there, year after year. To continue to engage with them year after year. I think that’s where there’s a bit of hesitancy in a lot of these places around technologies or solutions that have come in that are supposed to be the silver bullet, so to speak, for smallholder agriculture. There’s been so many promises. How many are actually seen through over the long term, beyond proof of concept, beyond an initial project? Particularly in the agricultural sector, where that pathway through from development of an idea, of an innovation, to actually it being implemented at scale, there are very, very few and far between. And so for us, that’s really what we’re trying to do and committing to do in places like Malawi. We’re making commitments to say, “We’re going to be here for the long term.”

HANNAH LABELLE
You’re also partnering with organizations that have local team members in these countries. How do these collaborations boost the impact of this governance project?

SIMON DYER
We can’t be everywhere that we need to be. So that’s where finding partners that are on the ground, that have the relationships with the farmers, that have the trust of the farmers already, is a massive thing. A new person coming into that context, whether it’s a white person from Australia coming in, is probably less helpful than anything. Even if we set up our own local team there, some new person coming in and telling them, “Hey, there’s this great thing that you should be using. It’s going to make this difference, da, da, da, da, da.” That doesn’t work, right? Because there’s no relationship. There’s no trust. There’s no history there.

That’s where we’re really trying to find these partners. And government, in a lot of cases, is kind of the ideal way in that one, because they’ve got those extension services, because they’ve got those support structures in place already. They become the real target in that space to go: “Okay, how do we get the people that are on the ground, that have the trust of the farmers, that have the relationship with the farmers? How do we get them to be the advocates for what we’re trying to do?” And if we can get them to be the advocates, again, it’s that thing. You’ve got one person that’s advocating for you, but they’re advocating with thousands of farmers. That then becomes the key because then it’s that thing of, you want to collect data back. You want to get information back about what’s happening. If we can find partners and we can build those collaborative relationships with those kinds of people to go: “Can we get some stories back from farmers about the impacts, about the benefits, what’s been going on in these spaces?” That’s really the key for us.

HANNAH LABELLE
Absolutely. And so how are you working with these stakeholders to ensure that this data and this portion of this governance project is really going to deliver value and positive impact? What are maybe some of the metrics that you’re using to kind of measure the positive impact that’s being delivered?

SIMON DYER
The obvious metrics are ones around, okay, how many sensors are in the ground? How many sensors are being read each day, each week? What’s the data level coming back? Is it increasing or is it decreasing? The collection of data and the collection of information is obviously one metric. The one that makes impact, though, is then: “How is that information used? Is that information actually making a difference to people’s lives? Is having a sensor in the ground helping farmers to grow more food with less water? Helping them to be more productive, to improve their food security, or improve their income and the profit from their farms [to] help lift them out of poverty?” Those are long-term metrics that are really hard to measure.

HANNAH LABELLE
What do you think is the biggest lesson that you’ve come away with, when you’re thinking about stakeholder engagement or collaboration with this project?

SIMON DYER
The problem that you think you’re going to solve is not necessarily what the farmer or the stakeholder thinks is the biggest problem from their side. So the best example we have on this one is from Malawi. The farmers are using the sensors. They’re getting the information back. We’re seeing these positive results in terms of readings coming through and farmers saying, “Yes, I grew 10% or 20% more food. Look, I’ve cut my water use by 20, 30, 50%.”

Then when they actually went onto the ground and started having conversations with these farmers and going, “What’s the best thing you like about VIA? What’s the best thing you like about these chameleon sensors coming in and helping you?” Almost across the board they say, “We’re not fighting over water anymore. My husband doesn’t have to sleep out in the field overnight to make sure we get first use of water in the morning.” Or, “My neighbors aren’t going out in the middle of the night to irrigate their crops because it’s the only time they can do it, because people take water when it’s not their turn.” The problem that we think we were solving, which was how do we help grow more food, is not actually the problem that they have. The problem that exists in these examples was actually, they needed a way to communicate about water. They needed a way to decide and to fairly and equitably allocate water across their community. You can’t know what’s going on in these places unless you actually go there, and actually get on the ground and actually talk to these people about why. Why is this happening the way that this is happening? And so many situations are unique in that space.

One of the other big lessons is not to discount the knowledge and experience that farmers have. They have so much intrinsic knowledge stored up in their heads from generations of growing crops in these environments. That’s a very, very useful and a very valuable thing and should not be, again, should not be discounted.

HANNAH LABELLE
VIA’s efforts were recognized in PMI’s Most Influential Projects 2024 list, which highlights initiatives that are advancing the UN SDGs. Is there anything you’d like to say about efforts to meet these SDGs that we haven’t discussed yet?

SIMON DYER
There’s a real focus on the SDGs and particularly around water and the use of water and water securities. Everybody knows that water is essential for life on this planet, right? And whether that’s healthy drinking water and water and sanitation for people, there’s a whole bunch of key SDGs around that, as well. Or whether it’s the way water is used in agriculture and in the environment, for food production and poverty alleviation, and all these sorts of things. So I think the big thing for us is, how do we get more people, more organizations, more stakeholders, more donor organizations that work in this space to see the transformational power of information in this sector? Technology isn’t the silver bullet in smallholder agriculture. Information is maybe not the silver bullet but is much more important than provision of technology in these spaces. How do you help people make better decisions around the way they use water at individual level, at community level, at regional, at country, at transboundary/national level? We all need to use water better. And so what we really try and push through and focus on is this idea of, how do you see the importance of information? And that when you’re going to intervene with infrastructure, with anything, you’ve got to have an information system built behind that. Otherwise, the chances of a long-lasting positive outcome are greatly diminished.

HANNAH LABELLE
Simon, thank you so much. That’s a great way to end it. I really enjoyed the conversation.

SIMON DYER
Yeah. Thanks so much, Hannah. Thanks for your time.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
And thank you for listening to Projectified. Like what you heard? Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a rating or review. Your feedback matters a lot—it helps us get the support we need to continue making this show. And be sure to visit us online at PMI.org/podcast, where you’ll find the full transcripts for episodes as well as links to related content, like useful tools and templates, the latest research reports and more. Catch you next time!