

A partnership between the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation, 17 Rooms is an experimental method for advancing the economic, social, and environmental priorities embedded in the world’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Explore the project
The 17 Rooms initiative was launched by the Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation in September 2018, gathering on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, as an experiment to stimulate new forms of action for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since then, 17 Rooms has evolved on two tracks:
17 Rooms aims to promote pragmatic action within each SDG, while also stimulating productive connections across all goals. Since 2020, the initiative has been co-chaired by John McArthur, senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings, and Zia Khan, senior vice president for innovation at The Rockefeller Foundation.
In practical terms, 17 Rooms convenes participants from disparate specialist communities to meet in their own “Rooms,” or working groups, one for each SDG. Each Room is tasked with a common assignment of identifying cooperative actions they can take over the subsequent 12-18 months. Emerging ideas are then shared across Rooms to spot opportunities for collaboration. The process offers an efficient way of convening natural allies, ideally promoting enough familiarity to enable collaboration and enough diversity to spark new ideas and pathways to action.
While the nature of 17 Rooms methodologies continues to evolve through ongoing learning and experimentation, three design principles help define a 17 Rooms experience:
These principles contribute to three distinct forms of value: action, insights, and community.
If you are interested to learn more or potentially organize your own 17 Rooms-X activities, please email [email protected].
In late 2020, a formal secretariat team was established within the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings to support the overall 17 Rooms initiative, working in close day-to-day collaboration with partners in the Innovation team at The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the rest of the 17 Rooms network.