Over the past six months that I served as a Global Citizenship Fellow for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF in Chicago, I have met many students eager to take action on complex global issues. This month, I joined nearly 400 Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from around the world at the 2012 Girls’ World Forum in Chicago who had gathered to mobilize around the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 1, 3 and 7. Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from more than 80 countries came together with a common goal—to take action on three of the most prominent global issues of our time: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, promote gender equality and empower women, and ensure environmental sustainability.

I recently attended the JCI Global Partnership Summit in New York. Junior Chambers International is a member-based organization with over 200,000 members. More than 350 attendees participated in the summit which focused on how civil society, business and government can work together to create positive change through the framework of the UN Millennium Development Goals

World leaders recently met at the United Nations to discuss the state of progress on the efforts to implement goals set for 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals) to reduce poverty and disease. As a contribution to those discussions, UNICEF released its “Narrowing the Gaps to Meet the Goals” study. The landmark document advocates that major gains in child and maternal health can be best achieved by focusing programs and resources on the very poorest women and children in the poorest countries. Reaching the poorest of the poor not only is the right thing to do, it is the most effective way to save the lives of millions of vulnerable children and their mothers by 2015.

Tomorrow, October 15, is Global Handwashing Day … and also Blog Action Day. The U.S. Fund is making it really easy to participate in both — all without leaving your desk!

This year’s report, Towards Universal Access, assessed HIV/AIDS progress in 144 low- and middle-income countries in 2009. It documents great successes in access to treatment, prevention and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services.

Yesterday President Obama addressed the UN summit on Millennium Development Goals and announced a new US global development policy that forges stronger ties between foreign aid and national security.