Living out your un-Ltd dream

Selene, Andrea, Dora, Anna, Sirin. Four names, four women and four different dreams that share a common future: stimulating social change with the strength of their own means. What do they have in common? For a start, they are all young, they all have degrees and they have all chosen to build their own, un-ltd (unlimited) careers. Here are the faces of today?s change makers, twenty-something year old women who refuse to sit around and wait for things to change.

Dora Montagna, the 28 year old founder of Foundation for Freedom, is Italian but lives in Poland and says that all she seeks is to ?make something of my life that I like and believe in?. But in the meantime the foundation she set up with two friends is gaining a name for its self and its anti-racism campaigns that have involved hundreds of youths from across the whole of Eastern Europe.

Andrea Filip, 27, claims that ?social enterprise is the best tool we have to control immigration?, claim that she lives up to as the founder and director of the Career Development Centre, an NGO that has helped more than 20 thousand young people to build their career and future in Romania.

Anna Dobrovolskaya is 22 and only earns 200 euros a month, because human rights activists in Russia are not seen in a good light. She graduated in economics and learned her human rights ?on the road? as there are no Masters degrees for people who want to work in the third sector where she is from. Seminars, internet courses, study periods abroad is how she learned what she needed to know to become part of the Youth Human Rights Movement, an international network of 120 NGOs and one of the largest human rights NGOs in Russia.

Youth empowerment is at the heart of Sirin Soyoz?s mission to ensure that young people everywhere in Europe be able to access the tools and resources they need to develop and grow. Youth Post, the web portal she is chief editor and manager of, is Turkey?s most important meeting place for youth and civil society and is about to launch, in partnership with the UNDP, Turkey?s 2008 Youth Report.

?You don?t have to be extraordinary to do extraordinary things?, says Selene Biffi, who founded Youth Action for Change in 2004 after presenting her project idea to Oxfam International?s Youth Parliament in Sydney. The NGO is a global platform that promotes free learning opportunities for young activists across the world. Selene criticises her native Italy for being apathetic and for not believing in young people, but she hopes to change all this by proving them all wrong!