Global Exchange was founded in 1988 and is an advocacy group, human rights organization, and a 501(c)(3) organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States. The group defines its mission as, "to promote human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice around the world." Global Exchange deals with a wide range of issues, ranging from the U.S. war in Iraq to worker abuse and fair trade issues. Since its inception, Global Exchange has enlisted thousands of members and supporters, by educating the U.S. public about what it thinks are the root causes of injustice and the impacts of U.S. government policies and corporate practices. The group builds people-to-people ties, engages grassroots education for action, and links social and environmental movements through public education, speaking tours, experiential travel called Reality Tours and activism. History In 1988, Medea Benjamin, Kevin Danaher, Kirsten Moller, and Kathie Klarreich founded Global Exchange. The formation of the organization was rooted in the increasing interdependence of national economies and the subsequent need to build political alliances across national boundaries to promote the group’s ideas about economic, social and political rights. Along with Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society, Global Exchange played a central role in organizing the 1999 Seattle WTO protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle in 1999. For many years Global Exchange produced a Green Festival Expo in Seattle, Washington. Global Exchange was part of a coalition of groups that charged US retailers, including Gap, with illegally underpaying workers in their sweatshops in Saipan. In 2011, Global Exchange released a book called, The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (2011), with articles by Maude Barlow, Pablo Solón Romero, Vandana Shiva, Nnimmo Bassey and others. Programs Global Exchange defined its goals to include increasing public awareness of injustice. They promote change within a profit-oriented global economy, to what it calls ‘people-oriented local economies’ which, supposedly, respect the rights of workers and nature. The Community Rights Program assists communities confronted by corporate projects to assert their right to make decisions, which the group says should be to that place ‘the rights of residents above the legal rights of corporations’. The Economic Activism for Palestine Project focuses on corporate accountability for human rights and international law violations in Palestine. The program, with an anti-Zionist focus, targets corporations that are directly involved in Israeli settlement activity