Only a well-considered and a well-designed long-term strategy for action can turn our aspiration for global systemic change into reality. Our strategy involves actions in four interrelated stages:
Only a well-considered and a well-designed long-term strategy for action can turn our aspiration for global systemic change into reality. Our strategy involves actions in four interrelated stages:
Only a well-considered and a well-designed long-term strategy for action can turn our aspiration for global systemic change into reality. Our strategy involves actions in four interrelated stages:
Stage 1: Articulation and Education
Thousands of people from dozens of countries around the world came together to co-create the Declaration of Interdependence and Pledge. These documents, translated into a growing number of languages, represent our strong belief that a deep appreciation of our interdependence must underpin efforts to help build a healthy, safe, and sustainable future for everyone and for our common home.
This appreciation reminds us that our health, safety, and well-being reside in each other and our shared ecosystem. It places an urgent demand on each and all of us to act for the common good.
To do this wisely, we must clearly identify the core essential challenges we seek to address and align our means and ends.
Although our concern for the welfare of humanity begins with each one of us, the core underlying problem we seek to address — the dangerous mismatch between our global problems and predominantly national solutions — is systemic, so our response must also be systemic.
Stage 2: Network of Networks
Our ideals and global community will be focused on improving all of our lives, making everyone safer, and helping protect our shared ecosystem.
Any person, organization, or entity can join us by signing the Pledge of Interdependence. We are open to everyone of any culture, community, ethnicity, organization, entity, interest, generation, orientation, or nation. We embrace a network of networks approach, seeking partnerships with all aligned organizations, associations, businesses, entities, and governments.
We believe that the best way to fix the structural problem we face is with an innovative new structural solution involving people around the world coming together to drive real and meaningful change. That is why we are building a fully inclusive global social movement and political force representing the democratic expression of our common humanity.
We seek to augment, inspire, and ultimately change the behavior of sovereign states and the essential international institutions our governments have created, not supplant them.
We cannot do that alone.
Stage 3: Specific Action Campaigns
Our community will advocate for addressing specific global challenges of most urgent need.
In conjunction with the OneShared.World launch on May 6, 2020, we announced our first two campaigns. These include a campaign to enhance global public health (chaired by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Dean Michelle Williams) and a campaign to provide emergency support to the world’s most vulnerable populations as the COVID-19 pandemic likely shifts from the Northern to Southern Hemispheres (chaired by Ambassador Rick Barton).
Over the coming months, we will announce additional campaigns, each focusing on a different major threat that has not been adequately addressed due to the failure of our existing institutions.
Each of these campaigns will follow the same general approach.
After the issue is carefully framed based on consultations with the diverse voices of local activists and advocacy leaders, a global expert advisory committee will be created to address a particular global problem. The expert advisory committee will then develop a concise action plan answering the following five questions:
- What would it take to solve this problem in a meaningful and sustainable way?
- What is the difference between this vision of where we should be and where we are today
- What steps must we take now to address our most urgent needs within the context of our current systems and structures?
- What must we be doing now to move from our current systems and structures toward actually solving the problem?
- How will we track our progress and determine success?
A global campaign will then be launched around each of these action plans. Each will consist of two distinct parts: a commitment to action and the development of action tool kits that can be used by different groups of people at different levels of local, regional, or national political and social involvement. For each, people, entities, and organizations will be invited to sign on to a pledge committing themselves to act. They will then receive an advocacy/action tool kit to help them reach out to local, national, and international officials, launch or join social media campaigns, and build coalitions for change.
Stage 4: Integration and Creation of Interdependence Movement
As our single issue campaigns will make even more clear, no single global threat — from pandemics to ecosystem destruction, climate change, and the proliferation weapons of mass murder — can effectively be solved without fixing the broader problem in how our world is organized.
To address this systemic shortcoming, we seek to ensure the interdependence agenda is incorporated into the missions and platforms of organizations, entities, businesses, political parties, and governments around the world.
Our ultimate goal will be reached when leaders worldwide at all levels — from local communities and city councils to state and provincial legislatures, national governments, G7, G20, the United Nations — wisely balance national interests with global public interests for mutual benefit across geographies and generations, and when the needs of all people and our common home are addressed effectively, equitably, and sustainably.
To make this happen, we invite you to join us turning OneShared.World from aspiration to reality.