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Investing in people to achieve the health-related Sustainable Development Goals

As heads of state, ministers, and many thousands of other stakeholders gather in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, it seems a good time to reflect on the state of progress in reaching the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While there has been progress in some areas and some geographies, the most recent Sustainable Development Report released in June of this year found that all of the SDGs are seriously off-track, including those focused on health.

30 October 2023 | People First Talk with Cheryl L. Dorsey

In this People First Talk, we heard from Cheryl L. Dorsey, President of Echoing Green, a global organization seeding and unleashing next-generation talent to solve the world’s biggest problems. We heard from Cheryl about what kind of leadership development work she’s seen have the greatest impact, and about her efforts to center diversity and equity to tackle injustices that persist in the system.

11 October 2023 | People First Talk with Safeena Husain

In this People First Talk, we heard from Safeena Husain, Founder of Educate Girls, about her work to educate millions of girls in the most remote parts of India and enable the leadership of thousands of community-based volunteers across more than 21,000 villages in pursuit of this. Safeena will share how her organization combined a results-driven approach with a focus on mindset shifts to break patriarchal structures, in order to achieve both deep transformation at the community level, as well as system-level impact at scale.

4 organizations taking a fresh approach to localization

The global development sector is grappling with how to walk the talk on localization.
USAID has grabbed the headlines, after Administrator Samantha Power pledged in 2021 that
25% of all funding would go to locally led organizations by 2025 — a goal she recently admitted
could be difficult to meet.

21 March 2023 | People First Talk with Adria Goodson

In this talk, Adria Goodson, Director of the Ford Foundation Global Fellowship Program, shared her lessons learned on the leadership we need now and how to cultivate it. We’ll explore questions such as: how we increase leaders’ ability to deal with complexity, what it takes to co-create leadership programs that share power, and how we can tap into collective wisdom to disrupt colonial mindsets and imagine the world in a different way.