Developed by the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, and the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, the official website of the United States of America for U.S. National Statistics for the Sustainable Development Goals contains indicator-level data across all 17 SDGs. Built on the Open SDG platform, this site reports official statistics for 109 indicators, with 139 additional indicators under “exploring data sources” status.

This website and dataset were updated in Fall 2024 for the first time since 2017.

The United Nations Foundation and the Brookings Institution’s Center for Sustainable Development will be convening the 6th annual flagship event featuring American Leaders Advancing the SDGs on September 24, 2024, from 8:00 – 10:00 AM ET in New York City.

This year’s event comes at a critical moment as world leaders convene at the UN’s Summit for the Future and as we approach the five-year countdown of the SDGs. It’s also a special opportunity to highlight narratives of resilience and empowerment of local leaders who are acting to ensure that their communities are not being left behind in the quest for a sustainable future for all.

Justice is more than an ideal. The Global Goal of Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions is a prerequisite for progress and a mutually reinforcing framework.

“I was fortunately one of the luckier students. Who is exposed to the Sustainable Development Goals starting in middle school?” asks Prishaa Shrimali. She is now a sophomore at Marymount School of New York, but was first introduced to the SDGs in 5th grade. Her first project? Creating a poster related to SDG 6: clean water and sanitation. Since then, she has been engaged with several independent, non-academic affiliated projects related to the Goals. Among these projects is a poetry chapbook she created called “The Global Goals: In Verse,” which combines statistics and poetry to educate younger audiences on sustainable development. She’ll be presenting this project at the International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD) 2024 in September. 

Prishaa is part of the graduating class of 2030, which is also the deadline to achieve the Global Goals. She has already been tapped by the Columbia University Center for Sustainable Development and Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens to help develop an instrumental toolkit key to SDG 4: Quality Education. To break down this project in ways other students can understand, she’s centered her research around a set of questions, like: “What is global citizenship education? How can we implement global citizenship education in school environments? What student-led activities can we do … and how can we engage different subjects for each student?” 

An intersectional toolkit like this not only has potential to reach a larger audience, but also to reach students across disciplines in politics, science, justice, and more. “It’s kind of a global community in a sense, because you’re incorporating students of all interests, and I find that really powerful,” Prishaa said. At the same time, it can provide people an entry point to global issues. 

Prishaa hopes that even after the 2030 deadline for the SDGs, we can meaningfully include more nonprofit organizations aligned with specific indicators under the Global Goals. She is optimistic for the future because as she puts it, her generation is not only “very outspoken,” but “we definitely are not afraid to voice our opinions on certain things.”

— Dynahlee Padilla-Vasquez, United Nations Foundation

“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” That’s SDG 11, a cornerstone of Jennifer Borrero’s work as a Global Goals Ambassador with the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA) and Founder of the Youth Housing Coalition. A Colombian-Mexican born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, she remembers visiting her family in rural communities in Mexico. She saw firsthand the  different levels of access to equity and infrastructure throughout different countries.This was especially evident when her parents split up and her dad became homeless at one point. Witnessing this underscored “how important housing is and the fact that everyone deserves a place to live.”  

Through her work as a Global Goals Ambassador, Jennifer represents UNA-USA at conferences, summits, and events related to sustainable development. Bringing her global advocacy work home, she built a network of young and passionate people, particularly members of Gen Z who “could see themselves as future housing leaders.” The value-add that the Youth Housing Coalition is able to provide, explains Jennifer, is that it essentially provides “a community stewardship lens for real estate developments.” For example, “How can we ensure that there is zero displacement for people that have lived there for generations? How can we make sure that these developments are sustainable, and that the money being made from these developments is going back into the community?” 

When Jennifer has an opportunity to talk to students and young people in general, she does her best to share knowledge via an economic and racial equity lens. But like all of the 17 SDGs, Goal 11 is intersectional in nature; housing rights connect with climate and gender equality, along with access to food and healthcare, education, water and sanitation, and economic mobility. And she’s excited to continue those conversations as a UNA-USA Global Goals Ambassador this year and beyond. 

— Dynahlee Padilla-Vasquez, United Nations Foundation

If you ask Janice Hawkins when she first got involved with the SDGs, she’ll tell you she’s been supporting them all her life — even before universal ambitions like eradicating poverty, solving hunger, and safeguarding public health were codified into a global framework and adopted at the UN. She was the kind of child who volunteered to pick up trash in her neighborhood. A natural-born helper, Janice found her calling as a nurse.

“Most people go into nursing because they want to serve. They want people to be healthy. That’s the backbone of nursing,” she says. And, in many ways, good health is the backbone of the SDGs — and nurses underpin the field. “We are the largest healthcare workforce,” she says. “We are the frontline. We see social problems firsthand.”

As a nurse for the U.S. Army, Janice knows from experience that healthcare should be a basic human right. “I witnessed things that were outside of what I knew growing up and helped me to understand the inequities that were everywhere, specifically the need for vaccines.” 

Her deployments revealed why nurses — and their work delivering immunizations — are key for unlocking progress across the 2030 Agenda. “Ironically, nurses don’t even necessarily realize we’re advancing the SDGs. We’re just doing the work in front of us,” Janice says. “And because all the SDGs intersect with health and well-being, when we’re promoting one, we’re promoting the other.” 

Today, Janice is passing on her hard-earned knowledge as Chair of Old Dominion University’s Advanced Practice Nursing program. Her work is especially important given the need for more people in her profession. By 2030, the planet is projected to face a global shortage of 4.5 million nurses, according to the UN’s World Health Organization. 

Janice also encourages her students to take up advocacy. As a longtime champion for Shot@Life, a grassroots campaign of the United Nations Foundation that builds U.S. support for global immunization, Janice organizes workshops, phone banks, and trips to the nation’s capital so her students can meet with Members of Congress and their staff, and voice their support for UN agencies like UNICEF, which vaccinates more than half of the planet’s children.

“As nurses, we’re trained to be advocates, but we primarily do that at the bedside. We advocate for our patients, but we have rarely put them to use in the political arena,” Janice says. “Shot@Life is really who taught me to speak with legislators.”

For Janice, the SDGs offer a common ground and a unifying rallying cry for a profession that is historically underpaid, underappreciated, and underrepresented in policy-making decisions. 

After all, as she points out, their insights and impact are uniquely valuable: “How are you going to improve healthcare without nurses?”

— M.J. Altman, United Nations Foundation