In 2000, the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS) introduced a new educational initiative to provide graduate students and advanced undergraduate students with an opportunity to learn more about sustainable development. The course was designed to be a 2-week immersion into sustainability. Today, this successful endeavor exists as the Youth Encounter on Sustainability (YES), a summer school held every year in Switzerland by ETH Sustainability, the former AGS Zurich.
In the summer of 2000, as students from around the world gathered in Braunwald, Switzerland, the seeds for the formation of the WSC-SD were planted and further developed at the AGS AM 2001 in Lausanne and the YES course in Braunwald in the same year. Students were looking for a means of translating their collective will to take action into realising sustainability, through collaboration.
Just two years later, student representatives from the University of Tokyo (UT), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Cocody-Abidjan founded the “AGS World Student Community” in San Jose, Costa Rica and held their first annual meeting. A few months later the name was changed to the current name World Student Community for Sustainable Development, in short WSC-SD. This arose from students wanting to be an independent organization, but still work closely together with AGS.
In July 2003, an e-journal called VISION was launched as a platform through which members of the WSC-SD could share their ideas on sustainable development, update each another on their activities and have both the opportunity to publish own research in the field of sustainability and to read about the newest findings from their peers. Over the years, VISION published more than 200 articles and attracts a large readership of several hundred readers per day! However, the VISION e-journal has been temporarilty suspended due to insufficient volunteers to run the journal.
Over the past few years, we have welcomed several new student member groups. The student group from the University of Yaounde in Cameroon was granted membership in June 2004, and the University of Regina Students for Sustainability from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada were successfully accepted as partners and then members a year later. In 2008, we accepted as members the Students for Global Sustainability – Nairobi, from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. In January 2009 the Sustainable Development Society from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and a group called QUARK from the American University of Cairo, Egypt, acquired membership status. Our latest accessions are the Colombian student community Corporacion Grupo Tayrona and BME Green Association from Budapest in Hungary. Our organisation has been further strengthened by the many Individual Members who are joining us.
