When will Human Sustainability Awareness Day be celebrated? September 16th of each calendar year.
What is Human Sustainability Awareness Day? These times are unprecedented, and the world is an exceedingly complex place. The last few years have brought about more change than we have seen in our lifetime. While we’re all focused on the headlines of the big seismic and disruptive shifts and changes that impact us, what is going underreported and, in some cases, completely unnoticed, is the human sustainability crisis unfolding right before our eyes.
The Human Sustainability Crisis is a result of the cost of living crisis, broken career paths, as well as the mental and lifestyle crises we face, which impact our standard of living, quality of life, and overall well-being, regardless of our income level, age, or profession.
Just as we’ve come to understand that life on our planet will eventually become unsustainable if we continue to create climate conditions that can become too toxic for our existence, similarly, the huge and disruptive shifts we’re experiencing in our standard and quality of living, without a clear path forward to a successful and meaningful future is now our human sustainability crisis.
Therefore, in order to create a more sustainable future for all, Human Sustainability Awareness Day aims to start a national and global conversation that helps us recognize and address this crisis by mobilizing individuals, organizations, and leaders to take action and amplify our collective impact.
How should Human Sustainability Awareness Day be celebrated or observed?
- Educate: Information and resources are available at https://blueprintglobal.com/human-sustainability-awareness-campaign/
- Show support: Join the campaign by pledging your support, downloading key facts and sharing them with your friends.
Why was Human Sustainability Awareness Day created?
What is the Crisis of Human Sustainability? It is the perfect storm of three crises that have converged at the same time.
- The first storm is the Crisis of Mobility.
- One of the fundamental assumptions that used to guide our lives was that getting a good degree to get a job, followed by putting in the hard work, would be rewarded with upward mobility and greater security. The longer you worked, the more value you created, the more stability and predictability you built for the future. But this ladder to success and upward mobility was based on assumptions that are now broken, unclear, or shaky at best. A degree no longer provides a reliable foothold into the work world. Clear career ladders no longer exist as they used to, and now, hard work and loyalty no longer guarantee that you will not be laid off or replaced by AI.
- The second storm is the Crisis of Insecurity.
- People are worried about their employment, the increasing cost of living, and their dwindling savings. Now, many people, regardless of their income level, age, or profession, live with a constant worry that even if they can meet their needs today, there is a lack of security because overall, they’re battling constant storms and threats. They worry that even if they just get by today, they know they are vulnerable to meeting the demands of tomorrow.
- The third storm is the Crisis of Uncertainty.
- Uncertainty and the faster pace of unexpected change and disruption are the new context and backdrop for our lives. We no longer deal with just a few changes and transitions. Now, we are experiencing more and more devastating, hard, impossible-to-predict, once-in-a-generation occurrences happening one right after the other or all at once. And it isn’t just the fact that we’re experiencing these changes that leaves us so unsettled; it’s also the incredible and increasing rate of these changes that leaves us feeling imbalanced.
All together, these are the crises of Human Sustainability.
When we look at the increasing level of debt, the inability to pay for an emergency, decreasing savings, not enough in retirement, the percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck, the people working multiple jobs, the budgetary trade-offs, the graduates unable to get a foothold into the work world, the people delaying retirement, the people who are unretiring, the greater worry about the impact of a layoff, the people relocating to chase housing affordability, not chasing their dream, and high levels of stress, we can clearly see the story of a lack of personal and economic well-being and resilience in the face of a cumulative and collectively tougher environment. These crises are no longer personal issues for each individual to solve; they are collectively national and global crises that require a coordinated effort to resolve.
Who created this day? This day was created by Blueprint Global in 2025.