In the year 2000, 189 Member States of the United Nations agreed to help the world’s poorest nations to make significant and measurable progress towards a better life for their people by the year 2015.

Profiling the lives of eight young people in eight places – Brazil, Cambodia, India, Jamaica, Morocco, Uganda, the the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Hoima, Uganada , and the Ukraine – this website, Chasing the Dream, explores their difficult living situations and their intense desire, whatever the odds, to lead better lives. Photographs by Diego Goldberg and articles by Roberto Guareschi on the youth can be seen by clicking on Eight Lives.

In Chasing the Dream workshops young people in each of the eight places were invited to comment, in photography and writing, on their own particular likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, and explore some of the social issues that frame their lives. A selection of these photos and texts are featured in Views from the Inside.

The Chasing the Dream website also examines how each of the eight Millennium Development Goals – including the elimination of extreme poverty, improving maternal health, preventing and treating HIV/AIDS, and ensuring universal education – can be accomplished to allow these highly motivated young people not only to survive, but eventually to flourish. These Goals can be read about by clicking on What are the MDG’s?

There are also sections on the site, How to Help, About Us and Contact, for the interested reader. This website also accompanies an exhibition, Chasing the Dream, on view at the United Nations headquarters, from August 12 to October 30, 2005.

The point of Chasing the Dream is to remind ourselves that there are millions of young people who desperately need to be given a chance.

As for their dreams, they are quite capable of chasing them by themselves.