FAQs

OneShared.World is a broad and inclusive movement of stakeholders working collaboratively across diverse cultures, communities, ethnicities, organizations, entities, interests, generations, and nations to ensure a better future for humankind and the sustainability of our collective home.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that we are all one global community. Regardless of our cultural, political, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences, we depend on each other for our lives and livelihoods. Our interdependence transcends all boundaries. As part of OneShared.World, we are working together to meaningfully address our greatest common existential challenges.

The failure of governments and international institutions to prepare for, prevent, and adequately respond to the COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for this movement. These failures have exposed a deeper structural problem: the mismatch between the global challenges we face and the predominately national way we are organized to address them.

These challenges are broader than deadly pathogens, they include climate change, ecosystem destruction, weapons of mass destruction, and global under-development.

The virus has shown us that we are interdependent, whether or not we wish to be. Each person’s security and well-being reside in every other person and in our common ecosystem. We must work together and help each other. We realize that helping others is not charity, it is one of the best investments we can make in helping ourselves.

Vision

A world where humanity has come together to solve our greatest common challenges for ourselves, for our children, and for all future generations.

Mission

Generate an active, global voice to address the mismatch between all peoples’ essential rights and common needs, and the shortcomings of our leaders and institutions.

This movement began as a speech, declaration, and blog post that went viral by Jamie Metzl in March. That viral discussion has become a movement of thousands of people in 120 countries on five continents who have donated over thousands of volunteer hours. Our members include university presidents, former prime ministers and governors, artists, and people of all backgrounds, ages, and orientations.

Our Declaration of Interdependence has been translated into Arabic, Armenian, Chinese (S), Chinese (T), Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Tibetan, Turkish, Xhosa, and Zulu, with more languages coming soon.

Read our full declaration here and sign our pledge here.

Our goal is to build a social movement and political force of people around the world working collaboratively to solve our biggest common problems. We will drive real and meaningful change in practices, structures, systems, and outcomes ensuring tangible progress toward addressing our greatest collective needs.

We cannot wait for leaders to save us. It is up to each one of us to step forward to work together to save ourselves.

Only a well-considered and well-designed long-term action strategy can turn our aspiration for global systemic change into reality.

Our strategy is built on four essential pillars:

1. Public engagement and education
2. Broad partnerships with aligned organizations
3. Focused issue campaigns
4. Integration of an appreciation of the mutual responsibilities of interdependence into the missions, platforms, and agenda of organizations, political parties, governments, and international bodies around the world

OneShared.World has started by launching two major global campaigns to advance these goals.

The first, “Rise or Fall Together,” chaired by Ambassador Rick Barton, launched on July 16, calls for an aggressive emergency action plan for assisting the most vulnerable populations as the COVID-19 pandemic likely shifts toward the Southern hemisphere in the coming months. Read the report and add your voice.

The second, co-chaired by Harvard School of Public Health Dean Michelle Williams and World Toilet Organization founder Jack Sim, will seek to enhance our global public health capacities for the benefit of all.

No. Many nation states do great things and we are not trying to supplant them. Nor are we trying to take the place of the United Nations, which we fully support. We simply want to make sure our governments and international institutions are doing everything possible to protect us.

Our movement seeks to amplify the desires of people across the globe to work together to make sure our common needs are addressed. We believe that working together will make all of us, our countries, and our world safer.

If we had had an international health organization with a robust pathogen surveillance system in place when the first evidence of the coronavirus appeared, a fully resourced team of experts would have been immediately dispatched to work with local authorities to squelch the disease.

If the outbreak could not be contained, the organization would have led governments around the world in a coordinated campaign to stop it. The organization would have shared the most recent information and best practices for containment, coordinated consistent messaging the world over to help facilitate the most targeted, efficient, and effective response possible. It would have served as a traffic cop for efforts to develop treatments and vaccines and made sure that the best available treatments were available the world over.

After the crisis, the organization would study lessons learned so we can do even better the next time. These would include strengthening its surveillance capabilities, intensely preparing for the next pandemic, and working aggressively to buttress local health systems and help prepare local officials, civil society leaders, and general publics for future threats.

The World Health Organization is essential to our global response to this pandemic, but the states who created and fund the WHO never gave the necessary authority and resources we need it to have.

The same story could be told about most any other major global threat. Our government and international institutions, as great as some of them may be, have note been able to protect us. In the name of our common humanity and survival, we must change that.

Not at all. It’s actually very practical. We have reached a point in the human experience where what happens in one part of the world, happens to all of us. That’s what the experience of this pandemic teaches us. We must find ways to work together.

An attitude of everyone for themselves ends up doing us harm. Helping each other in our interdependent world is the only way we can ultimately protect ourselves. This may sound like charity, but it’s actually self-preservation.

This moment in reminiscent of 1918, the end of WWI, and of 1945, the end of WWII. It’s up to all of us to help make sure the forces of inclusion outpace the forces of exclusion. That’s what OneShared.World is all about.

In 2025, we envision a world in which:

• Conversations from the dinner-table to the United Nations about once seemingly intractable challenges such as building a functioning global public health capacity, safeguarding our biosphere, overcoming the ravages of extreme inequality and uneven development, and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction have been reframed based on a deep common understanding of our interdependence.
• Political parties, large and small, left and right, have integrated the principles and responsibilities of interdependence into their platforms because of voter demands.
• The “Interdependence Agenda” is now one of the first orders of business at all global leadership gatherings, including the G7, G20, and UN meetings.
• 80% of Fortune 100 Companies reference Global Interdependence in their annual reports
• The United Nations has added an 18th Strategic Development Goal (SDG) called Global Interdependence.
• Every leader in every organization, public or private, around the world assumes a responsibility to consider the common needs of humanity and our shared ecosystem in all decisions.
• Each person recognizes that a world where everyone’s basic needs can be met sustainably is a safer place for everyone, and we have come together, with deep respect for our essential diversity, to turn that aspiration into a universal reality.

OneShared.World was formed and its creation driven by hundreds of volunteers from across the globe contributing many thousands of volunteer hours. Like any organization, we also need essential financial support to best realize our objectives. Although funding from individuals sharing our aspirations is critical to our collective success, we are also seeking institutional funding, particularly from like-minded foundations. Contributions can be made through our website and are tax-deductible.

One Shared World is a fiscally sponsored project of Social Good Fund, a California nonprofit corporation and registered 501(c)(3) organization, Tax ID (EIN) 46-1323531.