Imaginenations Group

The ImagineNations Group is an international youth advocacy group founded by Rick R. Little, the founder and past president of the International Youth Foundation. Rick started developing the idea for ImagineNations in 2002, with an interest in engaging young people in the developing world in informing and influencing positive changes in human development in their own countries and on a global scale. As such, the ImagineNations Group partners with key leaders and national and international individuals and organizations to foster a movement aimed at engaging widespread involvement of youth in the developing world in envisioning better lives for themselves and their nations. These partnerships serve to guide, support, and promote the work of ImagineNations both within individual countries and globally. To provide young people with an outlet for their voices to be heard, ImagineNations and its partners will survey about a million young people in the developing world.

The survey is framed around the hopes, dreams, attitudes, and behaviors of young people, as well as their views about issues related to the Millennium Development Goals, a human development initiative developed in 2000 by the United Nations that was signed by every government in the world. The voices of young people, captured by the results of the survey and additional focus groups, will then be disseminated through a broad-based social awareness campaign involving, as examples, town meetings with youth, op-ed pages in local and international newspapers, magazine articles, dialogues on radio shows, and other venues. The social awareness campaign will provide a way for the voices of young people (who, in the developing world, make up more than 50% of the population) to inform and influence program and policy development within their respective countries as well as internationally, including influencing the involvement of donor agencies.

With the results of the survey serving to inform and influence program and policy development, ImagineNations and its partners will additionally seek to identify, improve, and scale up opportunities for healthy human development and to empower young people by providing them with the opportunities and resources needed to develop the skills and capacities to improve their lives as well as the lives of those in their respective communities and nations.

More information on ImagineNations is available on their Web site, http://www.imaginenations.org.