The US-Brazil Universities of the Future Consortium (USBUFC) supports student exchanges between US and Brazilian universities. It offers US and Brazilian students the opportunity to work together in international, interdisciplinary, and project-based sustainability experiences. The Consortium includes Ball State University, Texas A&M University, and the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS). Brazilian members include the University of Brasilia and the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
The Universities of the Future seeks to educate students to address the profound challenges that must be faced in the immediate and long-term future if humankind, as we know it, is to survive. Universities of the Future educate students as societal leaders to address:
- the major global environmental, social and economic challenges of the 21st century,
- challenges of how to intervene in systems (including planning, designing, and managing local and global economic and community development) so as to
- produce a world that is ecologically, socially and economically more healthy after intervention that it was prior to intervention,
- challenges of learning how to live within nature’s universal laws and within local and regional limits, and
- education of students to help their communities understand the dynamics in a local region and to pursue eco-economic and community development that builds environmentally-responsible, socially just, and economically viable local and regional communities.