People across America are using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a road map to recover better by turning these global ambitions into local action.

In Los Angeles, that means analyzing better data to create smarter policies — including emergency relief and recovery services for residents affected by COVID-19.

How do you achieve gender equity in Los Angeles? It’s a question that Tanya Pineda grapples with every day in her quest to better serve the 4 million people who live in the country’s second-largest city. As a municipal employee and member of the Mayor’s Innovation Team, she’s helping lead L.A.’s equity and justice efforts by collaborating across departments and industries to reimagine how the city functions — and help reach residents furthest behind first.

To get the job done, Tanya is joined by colleagues with a diverse set of backgrounds from data science to urban planning to journalism.

In addition, the city’s more than 50,000 employees have all been tasked with making gender equity a central part of their work. “It’s not just people who are dedicated specifically to this line of work,” Tanya says. Her team has met with the heads of all 38 city departments that report to the Mayor, from the Department of Transportation to the L.A. Zoo. “This has become a passion project for them too.”

The Innovation Team’s work extends beyond the city government, fostering partnerships across L.A. with academic researchers, entrepreneurs, and community leaders.

At the heart of these efforts lies the power of data and the common language of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 goals adopted by all UN Member States and embraced by governments, companies, and individuals worldwide as a blueprint toward a fairer, more resilient future for everyone, everywhere.

L.A.’s commitment to the SDGs has permeated political circles and urban planning, informing everything from how the city funds sports and recreation to the ways in which local schools and businesses measure, monitor, and benefit from open-source data.

“We’ve helped to pioneer the tracking and connecting of SDGs and to use them as a prism for everything we do — to have a city librarian, or a port director, or somebody who runs the largest municipal utility in the country, or heads up our fire department, to know that she or he has this prism through which everything we are doing must be refracted.” Mayor Eric Garcetti said last year during an event hosted by the Brookings Institution and the UN Foundation.

This prism also reflects the enormous potential that exists when diverse perspectives come together. And the SDG principle to Leave No One Behind means that everyone must be involved.

This shared commitment — to collaboration, sustainability, and equity — are what the Global Goals embody. “We like to say that just as the SDGs are interconnected, so our solutions need to be,” says Angela Kim, SDG Program and Data Manager for the L.A. Mayor’s Office.

The city’s work also reveals how this set of 17 universal aims — such as eradicating poverty and solving hunger — become more tangible at the local level. “They are no longer about lofty goals,” Angela says. “We are piloting and offering hyperlocal solutions, from reimagining public safety to investing in green spaces to supporting housing and food security.”

Read the full article about SDG progress by MJ Altman at United Nations Foundation.