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.
The Foundation was created to work closely with the UN to mobilize the ideas, people, and resources it needs to help solve global problems at scale. We focus on issues at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals, build novel innovations and partnerships across sectors to grow a diverse and durable constituency for collective 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.
The UN Foundation was founded in 1998 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner to work closely with the UN to address global problems. Ted’s goals in establishing the Foundation were to demonstrate the value of investing in the UN, encourage new partners to work with the UN, and promote strong U.S. leadership at the UN.
In our first 25 years, the Foundation has mobilized over $2 billion, numerous initiatives, and countless partners to support the UN and UN causes. This support helped the UN pioneer work in areas we often take for granted, from making sure children have access to life-saving vaccines to the rights of adolescent girls to our shared interest in a climate-resilient future for all.
Today, the Foundation focuses on mobilizing ideas, people, and resources to help the UN tackle some of the greatest collective action challenges of our time, including scaled collaboration to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the promise of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
These core capabilities help us work toward our mission.
