The PHP Foundation is a collective of people and organizations whose mission is to ensure the prosperity of the PHP language.
This is a direct quote from the new PHP Foundation page at open collective, major members of the PHP community have decided to form this foundation, members like JetBrains and Zend.
As the quote suggests, the foundation's main goal is to ensure the continuity and development of PHP as a language, and the first course of action is to hire core php developers, both part time and full time, and to do that they're using Open Collective which provides foundation as a service and through that, you can back this project and give back to the community!
One of the major reasons of the formation of the foundation is the departure of long-time contributor Nikita Popov, Nikita has been working on PHP since 2011, and in the past 3 years he was working at JetBrains on PHP Storm, but other than PHP, he's also contributed to Rust and LLVM and he decided to shift focus from PHP to LLVM.
This has sparked the creation of the foundation, although it was previously attempted.
So go on and put in your 2 cents, let's get it off the ground!
Read more in the JetBrains blog post