Noting “world leaders and advocates [will] gather at the United Nations on September 25 to kick into high gear what is expected to be a highly contentious, two-year process of negotiations to set international development priorities for a 15-year period starting in 2015,” Jay Winsten, an associate dean and director of the Center for Health Communication at Harvard School of Public Health, and Wendy Woods, a senior partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group, write in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog, “The danger in the upcoming talks is that an expansive, intellectually coherent but politically unachievable agenda will emerge, fueled by advocates for competing causes, that will undercut current efforts to tackle extreme poverty, hunger, and disease that enjoy widespread political and public support.” They discuss the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), “an ambitious set of non-binding milestones set in 2000 by international consensus for achievement by 2015,” and examine the “idea of folding the MDGs into an expansive set of Sustainable Development Goals designed to ‘overcome the interconnected crises of extreme poverty, economic instability, social inequality, and environmental degradation'” (9/20).