The United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) initiative, which aligns the efforts of higher education institutions with those of the United Nations to support and contribute to the organization’s goals and mandates, has appointed La Salle Campus Barcelona, a founding member of Universitat Ramon Llull, as Vice Chair of Teaching and Education of the UNAI SDG 9 Hub.
The appointment, effective for the 2025–2027 period, consolidates the campus’s commitment to developing a more sustainable and equitable future and offers it an opportunity to lead global higher education efforts to promote the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Accompanying La Salle-URL are Mount Kenya University, which holds the presidency, and Nagaoka University of Technology, which holds the Vice Chair for Research.
UNAI has recognized La Salle-URL’s commitment, accredited by ACEEU, to fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry collaboration through initiatives such as La Salle Technova Barcelona, the campus innovation park, and cross-disciplinary projects such as SDG Challenges. The appointment crowns a selection process with more than 330 university candidates from around the world and highlights La Salle-URL’s contribution to digital transformation, sustainable infrastructure development, and industry collaboration, the core principles of ‘SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure’.
Josep M. Piqué, Executive President of La Salle Technova and Commissioner for Entrepreneurial and Committed University of La Salle-URL, remarked: “This appointment as Vice Chair of UNAI SDG 9 Hub is recognition of La Salle-URL’s commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. It reaffirms our mission to educate professionals and drive projects with real impact on society, consolidating our role as an entrepreneurial university committed to the SDGs.”
UNAI, a UN initiative to align universities
Since 2010, UNAI has built a dynamic and diverse network of students, university professors, scientists, researchers, think tanks, higher education institutions, continuing education centers, and educational associations. The initiative now includes over 1,400 members in more than 147 countries, reaching more than 25 million people in education and research worldwide, representing a global diversity of regions and thematic disciplines.
The work of these institutions is crucial to advancing the SDGs, acting as incubators of new ideas and solutions to confront the many challenges of the present and future. The United Nations Academic Impact initiative serves as a link integrating all these stakeholders and ensuring that the international community harnesses the creativity, leadership, and innovation of young people and researchers for the benefit of humanity.
The campus’s commitment to sustainability
La Salle’s commitment is a living, ongoing process that encourages the community to engage with others’ lives and their own, with both local and global environments, and with the hope of building a better future. This commitment, rooted in La Salle-URL’s founding mission to train professionals of value and values to create a fairer and more sustainable world, drives the institution as an engine for transformation.
Leticia Duboc, professor and researcher at La Salle-URL, explains the importance of this engagement and the actions that make it possible: “At La Salle Campus Barcelona we understand sustainability as a collective action, which is why we launched the Sustainability Action initiative, a collaborative effort that seeks to define how we can contribute from within our community.”
Through a participatory process that involved more than 550 people, including faculty, researchers, administrative and service staff, students, and suppliers, this initiative has enabled the campus to reflect on the SDGs most relevant to the planet, North-South cooperation, and the local environment. “Beyond ‘SDG 4: Quality Education’ and ‘SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals’, which serve as the foundation of our action, our community feels particularly inspired by ‘SDG 1: No Poverty’, ‘SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities’, ‘SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities’, and ‘SDG 13: Climate Action’, because of their potential to drive deep transformations toward a fairer, more resilient society committed to collective well-being,” concludes Leticia Duboc.
Among other initiatives linked to the SDGs and sustainability, La Salle-URL has actively participated in the 2024 International SDG Chair of the Lasallian universities; annually promotes the SDG Challenges practice within the transversal course Thinking and Creativity; supports projects such as ‘La Salle Social Challenges’; and, as a member of Universitat Ramon Llull, has been recognized for its contributions to the SDGs in rankings such as the Impact Ranking produced by Times Higher Education.
