Media entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner founded the UN Foundation in 1998 because he believed the United Nations is indispensable to tackling humanity’s greatest challenges and driving global progress. The same belief guides us today.
We act as a strategic partner to help the UN mobilize the ideas, people, and resources it needs to deliver, and grow a diverse and durable constituency for collective action. We focus on issues at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals, build initiatives across sectors to solve problems at scale, and engage influencers and citizens who seek action. Partnership, and the power of smart and strategic collaboration, is in our DNA. We believe everyone has a part to play, everyone’s voice should be heard, and everyone has a stake.
We invest early in action-oriented ideas and give them a chance to take root, thrive and scale up. We were one of the first to pioneer innovative public-private partnerships. Today we support initiatives that work with the UN and partners to achieve impact at scale on the SDGs, climate change, and major collective challenges. We are home to a series of successful organizations and initiatives, either created or hosted by us, that have their own identity but that work as part of the UN Foundation family.
