About Connecting Global to Local

Connecting the Global to Local (CG2L) is identifying and reaching out to groups and individuals in local communities—through our own national activist program and through nationwide organizations and networks—in order to identify new voices and develop the existing voices that support a more cooperative and engaged U.S. role in the world. Working directly with these local and national organizations' existing networks, we want to form new partnerships with communities that have traditionally been underrepresented in the foreign policy debate or whose ideas are too often misunderstood by elected officials. CG2L is partnering with like-minded organizations to disseminate information and organize at the local level. CG2L wants to work with individuals, businesses, civic, veterans, faith-based, minority, youth, and grassroots organizations.

Why communities?

The disparity between what policy makers think the public wants from foreign policy and what the American public actually wants is what we know as the "foreign policy gap." Overall, the American public supports a collaborative and principled U.S. foreign policy. But because many Americans do not speak out on global issues on a regular basis, their elected officials assume that global issues have no impact on their constituents or are of no concern to them. The public, on the other hand, assumes that policymakers are representing the principled vision of foreign policy that constituents support. This disconnect is the gap. Because of this foreign policy gap, Citizens for Global Solutions, with the support of the Ford Foundation, created the CG2L initiative. Communities around the country need to take back the foreign policy debate. Engaged citizens need to articulate their opinions and make their voices heard. CG2L wants to work with and within American communities to help connect global issues to local action and to identify both local and global solutions to global problems like climate change, nuclear proliferation, and avian flu. Global change starts at home.

Connecting Global to Local is an initiative of Citizens for Global Solutions. CG2L wants to engage local communities and voices in the challenges and foreign policy debates face the United States. CG2L aims to demonstrate how global issues such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and avian flu have a local impact and what communities can do to advocate local, national, and international collaborative solutions. Citizens for Global Solutions is a membership organization working to build political will in the United States to achieve our vision of a future in which nations work together to abolish war, protect our rights and freedoms, and solve the problems facing humanity that no nation—not even the United States—can solve alone. We do this by educating Americans about our global interdependence, communicating global concerns to public officials, and developing proposals to create, reform, and strengthen international institutions such as the United Nations that will apply the rule of law while respecting the diversity and autonomy of national and local communities.