The Global Commons Foundation (GCF) seeks to support individuals, collectives and organizations engaged in creative and communicative practices relating to urgent contemporary issues and creating active alternatives for a democratic, just, and sustainable future.

GCF seeks to help found, nurture, and sustain an evolving global commons of critical, innovative, and imaginative responses to the political, social, cultural, and environmental crises of today’s world, which it views as opportunities for generating urgently needed, significant transformations. The Foundation defines “global commons” as a universally accessible and democratically shared space of dialogue, thought, and action.

GCF identifies these crises with the turbulences provoked by the sharpening of conflicts and inequalities that beset communities (howsoever they may be constituted), by the pervasive threats to the planet's environment, and by the continuing erosion of liberty, dignity, health, knowledge and well being of peoples everywhere. These provocations give rise to new forms of action and urgently require new modes of thinking and expression. They require, above all, a renewal of imagination.

GCF recognizes that responses to these crises, this renewal of the imagination, needs to be of a kind that cuts across artistic, academic, and scientific disciplines, and transcends boundaries of culture, social structures, geographies and political systems.

It also understands that these responses need in particular to embody and articulate perspectives from the Global South with the purpose of creating active alternatives for sustainable global futures. The term Global South is not meant to be taken strictly geographically, but as a category that encompasses the majority of the world’s areas of sharp inequality and conflict, which happen to be primarily in the geographical south (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), as well as similar spaces in Eastern Europe and in the urban sprawls and inner cities of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim.

The activities and operations of GCF shall be global in scope. The foundation will be free to set up offices or chapters in different countries and spaces in order to further its activities. Initially, the foundation will be located in San Francisco. The foundation shall be incorporated in accordance with the relevant laws of the State of California and the United States of America.