The World Social Forum and its local and regional offspring are open meeting spaces where progressive social movements, networks, non-profits and other civil society organizations get together to pursue their thinking, debate ideas, formulate strategies and proposals, share experiences, and network for effective action. The forums bring together people who want to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and participatory world. They are characterized by plurality and diversity; they are non-governmental and non-partisan. A social forum is what you make it — a meeting place, a debating forum, an exchange of ideas and solutions, a theater stage, a celebration, a festival, a bazaar — it can be any or all of these.

     About 20,000 people attended the first World Social Forum in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The event, which has been held each year since then, drew 150,000 in 2005. The sixth WSF was “polycentric,” held in three locations: Caracas, Venezuela; Bamako, Mali; and Karachi, Pakistan. The latest global event was in January, 2007, in Nairobi, Kenya.

     The World Social Forum was created to counter the influence and purposes of the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of top business and government leaders “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

LA Social Forum is a program of the International Humanities Center under Section 501{c}(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.