Human Rights – ideals, action, empowerment
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, enumerated thirty rights in “recognition of the … inherent dignity of all members of the human family.” In the year 2000, the world’s nations gathered to focus their development efforts around eight specific Millennium Development Goals. We use those goals to organize our links below. Each goal also links to information regarding the progress toward meeting it by 2015. As we make progress, we realize greater justice.
Importantly, progress has been made toward meeting all of the goals. Many of the links below offer opportunities to get involved and help ensure we achieve these goals as a global community, while some of the links simply provide more information for concerned global citizens. All of the links on our You Can Do It page offer opportunities for individual action.
Millennium Development Goal 1: End Poverty and Hunger
- Oxfam International, which began as a famine-relief organization, is now dedicated to ending poverty and injustice. Their Grow campaign is about creating a world where everyone always has enough food to eat.
- Bread for the World is a faith-based (Christian) organization dedicated to ending hunger at home and abroad.
- American Jewish World Service works to Fight Hunger from the Ground Up
- The Hunger Project is empowering women and men to end their own hunger and achieve lives of self-reliance and dignity.
Millennium Development Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education
- The World Bank’s review of progress toward universal primary education, along with the connection between education, women’s rights, and children’s health.
- A Brookings Institution explanation of “3 Reasons Americans Should Support Global Education.”
Millennium Development Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
- The Girl Effect is a collaborative of many different organizations working to advance girls’ and women’s rights around the world. It also has some excellent and informative short videos.
- Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading organizations dedicated to protecting and defending human rights, has an entire division dedicated to the fundamental rights of women.
Millennium Development Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality
- The World Health Organization’s strategies and progress on reducing child mortality.
- Viewchange.org, a project supported by Link TV and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, features a brief video on reducing child mortality, along with short videos on the other seven goals.
Millennium Development Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health
- Amnesty International has been successfully campaigning for human rights for more than fifty years. They’ve recently begun a campaign drawing attention to the fact that it’s more dangerous to give birth in the US than in 49 other countries, and African American women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than Caucasian American women are.
- The United States Agency for International Development’s efforts to promote maternal and child health.
Millennium Development Goal 6: Combat HIV/ AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases
- ONE, the grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, has an initiative to demonstrate the global public voice campaigning for an AIDS free generation by 2015.
- Learn more at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
Millennium Development Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability
- The New Economics Foundation works to advance economics as if people and the planet mattered.
- Concerned citizen Annie Leonard made a film in 2007 that she hoped would reveal the underside of our consumption and production patterns. The film, The Story of Stuff, became an internet sensation and remains a powerful starting point for considering individual roles and environmental sustainability.
Millennium Development Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development
- The European Union’s Development and Cooperation section shares its sense of (slow) progress on meeting development partnership goals.
- The Economist investigates the changing nature of aid and development in light of the economic rise of India, China, and other countries that were previously aid recipients.