Global Challenges Forum (GCF) Foundation, founded by Talal Abu-Ghazaleh and Walter Christman, is a Foundation legally incorporated in 2012 under the Swiss Civil Code as a not-for-profit international entity, based in Geneva, Switzerland. The Foundation, composed of think tanks, research centres, academic and educational institutions, is a convening body for Forums addressing the 21st Century shared existing and future global risks and challenges with the goal of contributing to their much-needed resolution.
GCF has launched a new action model of global partnerships by combining top-down UN agencies and national levels with bottom-up communities, impact investors, and youth entrepreneurs’ efforts, to chart and promote a resilience culture. GCF will coordinate with private, social and non-profit sectors, governments and organizations to empower next-generation youth leadership through creative thinking, integrated learning, and innovative technologies.
To carry out this model, GCF has established a worldwide network of leaders and has welcomed 12 new Members of the International Advisory Council from Australia, Colombia, China, Germany, India, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States to investigate opportunities and resources advocating for GCF mission and contributing to its success in their countries by engaging with local stakeholders.
One Million Youth Leaders beyond 2030 (1M2030) is a call to action launched in occasion of the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth on the 3rd of October 2018 during the Global Resilience Conference on Integrated Learning and Leader Development, in New Delhi, India, convened by the Global Challenges Forum (GCF) Foundation together with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
1M2030 was issued for young community leaders to achieve globally the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 agenda and beyond to enable them to become changemakers in their communities by providing an umbrella for fragmented worldwide initiatives (social entrepreneurship, peace building, economic governance, environmental preservation, etc.) to strengthen their scope, effectiveness, and business.
GCF National Chapters
On 1 September 2021, GCF Jordan was relaunched in Amman by the announcement of the Life in Abundance (LiA) initiative at the presence of GCF Co-Founder, former Jordanian Senator H.E Talal Abu Ghazaleh. LiA aims at empowering underprivileged schoolchildren by granting scholarships to youngsters from Jordan, Palestine, and in the Arab world. This launch event was first announced in an article of The Jordan Times.
On 18 May 2022, GCF Foundation India was launched in New Delhi at the Constitution Club of India, in an event organized by the GCF and Maadhiam International Council for Conflict Resolution with a series on youth leadership lectures on mediation, peace, justice, and good governance. On 19 May, a Youth and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Conference followed at the SRM (Sri Ramaswami Memorial University) University in front of over 300 students.