About

Good Ancestor Foundation is a US-based 501c3 charitable organization. You can read about some of our work on our home page.

Board Members
Cameron Colby Thomson - CEO/Chairman
Airick Journey Crabill - Education reformer, author, governance expert
Rachel Azafrani - AI policy and cybersecurity expert - Microsoft director of responsible AI, IEEE, NATO Autonomous weapons and Army science board
Gayle Karen Young - fmr Wikipedia chief culture and talent officer, international human rights advocate, mediator

Donors
Jason Dorsett
Jane Street Capital Founders and Management
Survival and Flourishing Fund
Civilization Research Initiative
Cameron Colby Thomson
FTX Philanthropies (defunct)

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Add yourself here by visiting the Donations and Volunteer pages, or reach out via Contact for information or assistance.

Quotes that inspired our founding

“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”
Jonas Salk, as quoted in Learning from the Future : Competitive Foresight Scenarios (1998) by Liam Fahey and Robert M. Randall, p. 332.

“Will we solve the crises of next hundred years?” asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
EO Wilson

"We're engaging in a set of activities which go way beyond the individual life span, way beyond children, grandchildren, way beyond parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to the whole frame of at least civilizational life. Once you get comfortable with that, then you start to go further out still, to three and a half billion years of life on Earth, and maybe we'll do another three and a half billion years. That's kind of interesting to try to hold in your mind. And once you've held it in your mind, what do you do on Monday?"
Stewart Brand, Long Now/WELL

"The stakes are immense, the task colossal, the time is short. But we may hope — we must hope — that man’s own creation, man’s own genius, will not destroy him. Scholars, indeed all men, must move forward in the faith of that philosopher who held that there is no problem the human reason can propound which the human reason cannot reason out." 
Einstein, Only Then Shall We Find Courage, New York Times, June 23 1946

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." 
Richard Feynman
(don't believe the expert, believe the experiment)

"Knowledge of the spirit-world is to be obtained by divination; information in natural science may be sought by inductive reasoning; the laws of the universe can be verified by mathematical calculation: but the dispositions of the enemy are ascertainable through spies and spies alone."
Mei Yao-Ch'en 1002-1060, commenting on Sun Tzu's Art of War (600 B.C.E.) 孫子兵法

The works of Carl Sagan