The Weeknd and Shakira will headline this year’s Global Citizen Festival September 27 in New York’s Central Park. They’ll be joined by Tyla, from South Africa; Mariah the Scientist from North America, and Ayra Starr, from Nigeria.
According to the festival’s co-founder, Australian Hugh Evans (the fest’s other founder is Ryan Gall), the decidedly international flavor of the lineup is very deliberate, reflecting the growing diversity of the more than 12 million members of the Global Citizen community.
As always, the only way to get tickets to the annual events is by doing charitable acts that contribute to one of the four initiatives that GC is championing this year in their quest to eradicate poverty.
I spoke with Evans about that quest, the lineup, the four initiatives and much more.
Steve Baltin: I talk with artists all the time about the fact that songs become prophetic. Nick Cave told me that as an artist you always write what it is you’re longing for. Do you think when you and Ryan started this years ago, that in a way you were creating what it was you guys were longing for?
Hugh Evans: Oh, absolutely. We just didn’t know in those early days exactly how it would grow so fast. You can never really tell. We were so young at the time, this was 13 and a half years ago. I just moved to New York, Global Citizen was a true start-up and Ryan and I were working out of his office in El Segundo and LA at the same time. We had this dream, or all we knew is we wanted to build the world’s largest movement of citizens to end extreme poverty because that was, as Nelson Mandela said at the time, the greatest challenge for our generation to end extreme poverty. And there was no way in those early days that we would have known that Global Citizen would become the largest social action-taking platform for young people on all of the sustainable development goals and that we would grow to have 12.5 million members around the world, that we would take the festival around the world and that we’d build Global Citizen now into a thought leadership platform, bringing together heads of state with political leaders, business leaders and artists . We didn’t know any of that in those early days. We just had a very clear mission and a very clear methodology. And our methodology has remained very consistent as our app has become better in the way in which we drive citizens to take action. It has become more sophisticated because as the world has changed, so too has activism. An advocate 15 years ago used to use Twitter as their main platform, whereas now with the advent of AI and the way in which, thanks to the Obama era of political organizing, mass emails don’t work anymore. So, you have to use an entirely different way of using user-generated content to demonstrate to decision makers that you have millions of members and that those members really believe in something. All of that has changed really in the last five, six years. We wouldn’t have foreseen that in those early days.
Baltin: It’s interesting though, for all of the changes that you’re talking about technologically at the end of the day, the human emotion has to remain the same. Obviously for something like this to succeed, it has to continue to trickle down generationally. So, have you seen the people get younger as you continue to do it?
Evans: Yeah, most of our members are Gen Z’s. In fact, we’re now tracking, between millennials and Gen Zs, they make up 75 percent of our membership base now. So, our members are always becoming younger, which is great because that’s the only way you grow as a movement is through continually attracting a younger group of citizens to take action. And that’s also been linked to the shifting musical genres. As we’ve seen how powerful Latin music is and has become, how powerful Afrobeats has become, how powerful K-pop has become, a lot of these genres have attracted a much younger audience as well. So, we’re finding a direct correlation [from]
the artists that are performing for free on the Global Citizen platform because everyone donates their time and our younger membership, which is continually growing, and at a consistently younger click year on year.
Baltin: Are you seeing people from around the world get more and more involved as the music tastes change?
Evans: We’re finding at Global Citizen half of our members are still in North America. But our largest growth markets right now are Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria and many parts of Asia. We’re seeing huge growth in India, which is unsurprising and we’re seeing huge growth in Japan as well. So, our biggest growth markets are all either newly emerged markets or emerging markets where you have huge population centers, a younger population. And often those markets, incidentally, as we just highlighted, have new musical genres that have influenced [things]
dramatically. Look at an artist like Tyla, who has come up in the last several years. She’s obviously from South Africa. And an artist like Tems, who performed last week when Global Citizen produced the first ever halftime show for the FIFA Club World Cup final. These genres have totally influenced every aspect of pop culture. So, I think that shift has definitely influenced our membership, but we’re seeing a younger skew here in the United States and in North America as well.
Baltin: Talk about this year’s headliners because obviously you have both a Canadian artist in The Weeknd, and then you have a Latin artist in Shakira. Was that an intentional thing in terms of reflecting global diversity?
Evans: Absolutely, everything we do when we curate our lineups is very intentional. So having The Weekend, who is Canadian, but with Ethiopian heritage, his parents are both, they’re both from Ethiopia. Then Shakira, who’s from Barranquilla in Columbia, but also here in the United States; you’ve got Tyla from South Africa; Mariah the Scientist, North America and Ayra Starr from West Africa and Nigeria. Then you’ve got Hugh Jackman hosting it from my home country of Australia. Yes, we’ve got all the continents covered. We obviously don’t have anything on the lineup yet that is K-pop. But we’re going to have more announcements over the coming months as well. We love it when we can bring together. Shakira just broke every record in selling out every single stadium in Mexico. The Weeknd, his tour is one of the highest grossing tours, not just this year, but of all time. So, you’ve got these enormous stadium acts, alongside these younger highly credible acts who just capture culture. And I think the exciting thing about that is that it can be channeled for good. The thing that makes our festival different from every festival on the planet is the only way you can enter is through winning tickets through taking action. And all of our actions have both a local and a global influence. The campaigns that we’re campaigning on this year have a global influence, but we also want to drive 40,000 New Yorkers to register to volunteer and help New Yorkers across the five boroughs. So, this year, we’re going tobbe scaling up our volunteer efforts through the app quite dramatically in partnership with both the Bowery Mission and what we’re going to be doing to clean up. Last year we did a huge cleanup in the Rockaways. This year we’re doing a huge cleanup at the Canarsie Pier in Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, and we can get out hundreds of our members for a given weekend. They sacrifice their entire weekend to volunteer. That’s the spirit of Global Citizenship, demonstrating that you care both about your local community, that you care about issues of homelessness, that you care about the environment locally, but you’re also willing to use your influence to influence global public policy. Honestly, I’ve never been more excited about our movement because it’s so hyper local as well as being hyper global.
Baltin: Do you keep the activation non-political for a reason, to keep people involved no matter what?
Evans: We think that the end of extreme poverty transcends politics. We think that it’s something that you have to be out of your mind to believe that a child should die for a lack of a 30-cent immunization. You have to literally be a psycho. So, we believe that it’s absolutely non-political. There are 808 million people still living in extreme poverty, that’s one in ten people around the world. When I was born in 1983 52 percent of the entire population lived in extreme poverty. So, literally half of the population. When I lived in India when I was 15 years old, there were 700 million people who were homeless or slum dwellers back in 1999. So, we have made amazing progress on the eradication of extreme poverty. And that’s why this year we’re focused on four big things. First, to provide access to education for 30,000 children because as Mandela also said, education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world and it’s the key to ending extreme poverty. If a kid can get education and a job, they can lift themselves out of poverty. So, our goal is to raise $30 million so that 30,000 kids can learn to read and write. And we’re doing this as part of our FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund that we hope to announce on stage in Central Park on September 27. The second thing we’re working on, which is also linked to poverty, but it might sound like it’s not, is to protect 30 million Hectares of the Amazon rainforest. Because Indigenous people in the Amazon, who are also the most likely to be affected by extreme poverty in the Amazon, are the ones who need alternative livelihoods so that loggers don’t cut down Hectares of the Amazon to try to create some cheap meat products. We need leaders from Germany, France and Norway to commit to protect, restore and wild the Amazon rainforest. This will protect the equivalent of the size of Italy and keep more than 20 billion trees standing. Thirdly, we need to expand energy access to one million people in Africa. And this is clean energy access. Because if you’re a kid growing up in rural Africa, there are 600 million people across Africa right now that don’t even have access to basic electricity. How do you think they can be part of the AI revolution when they don’t even have basic electricity? So we’re calling on the leaders of Denmark, the UK and Australia to support businesses who are willing to invest in Africa’s energy future, but they need to be subsidized to do so because it’s a riskier investment. This is really about investment, not aid, because by training 50,000 young energy workers, we can bring clean energy to one million people across the continent. And then the fourth objective, as I said, is we’ve set out with the goal of trying to drive 40,000 New Yorkers to register to volunteer to help New Yorkers. We want to serve meals, clean up the waterfront, and also mentor graduates as they search for jobs. So, we’ve got three different volunteering programs that we’ve set up this year so that New Yorkers can, even if you can’t participate in one of the hands-on programs, participate virtually because we have a big partnership with Gidera. So, you can do virtual volunteering as well across New York. So, our team, I’m really proud of them. I think they’ve thought of everything about how we can engage citizens locally and globally.