On an October night in Perth in 2011, before Global Citizen had its name, 5,000 people came together for a concert.
John Legend performed. Australian artists took the stage. A crowd gathered beneath the lights at an amphitheater, far from many of the places where one of humanity’s oldest diseases was still threatening children.
But the night was not really about music. It was about polio.
The End of Polio Concert in Perth had been organized ahead of a meeting of Commonwealth leaders to turn public attention into support for action. Thousands of people had signed a petition calling on governments to invest in efforts to eradicate the disease.
The morning after the concert, leaders announced $118 million in new funding for polio eradication.
There was something powerful inside that moment: people who may never meet the children affected by polio had decided their lives mattered anyway.
That idea — that another person’s future can matter to us even when we do not share a border, a language, or a lived experience — would become the heart of Global Citizen.
The concert helped establish an approach that would later become central to Global Citizen: bringing people together through culture and giving them meaningful ways to take action.
The following year, Global Citizen launched. Fourteen years later, that idea continues to shape who we are.
A Movement Built on Participation
Global Citizen’s story did not begin with the belief that a concert alone could end poverty. It began with the belief that people could help shape the decisions and investments that can end extreme poverty.
Originally founded as the Global Poverty Project in 2008, the organization focused on helping people understand extreme poverty and, crucially, their own ability to contribute to progress.
Then came Perth. And later, in September 2012, 60,000 people gathered on New York City’s Great Lawn for the first Global Citizen Festival in Central Park.
Again, music brought people together. But participation was part of the experience.
People could not simply buy their way into the festival. They earned tickets by learning about global issues and taking action: signing petitions, contacting leaders, sharing campaigns, and using their voices.
That distinction mattered then, and it matters now. Because Global Citizen has never asked people simply to watch. We ask people to join the movement.
What Does It Mean to Belong to a Global Movement?
The world we inhabit today looks very different from the one we knew in 2011.
We have lived through a pandemic that crossed borders faster than any government could close them. Climate change is no longer a distant warning but a daily reality for communities facing droughts, floods, fires, crop failures, and displacement.
Conflicts are separating families. Inequality continues to shape who gets an education, who has electricity, who can access health care, and whose future is allowed to feel secure.
At the same time, we have never had more information about one another. A crisis thousands of kilometers away can appear on our phones within seconds.
Yet being able to see more does not always mean feeling closer. Sometimes it means the opposite.
The scale of the challenges we face can overwhelm us. We scroll past another crisis, another challenge, another statistic. Not because we do not care, but because it is difficult to know what caring is supposed to lead to.
That is where global citizenship matters. It is not about carrying every problem in the world on your shoulders. It is about recognizing that our lives are connected — and that even when we cannot do everything, we can still do something.
From Johannesburg to Our Living Rooms
Over the years, that choice has taken many forms. In 2018, Global Citizens came together in Johannesburg for Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100, carrying forward Nelson Mandela’s belief that poverty is not inevitable and can be overcome through human action.
Years earlier, speaking to a crowd gathered in London's Trafalgar Square, Mandela offered a challenge that still resonates:
Then, in 2020, gathering together suddenly became impossible. COVID-19 emptied streets, closed schools and workplaces, separated families, and highlighted significant gaps in access to health care and economic security.
So the movement changed shape.
One World: Together At Home connected people from their living rooms while supporting health workers and the global pandemic response, ultimately generating $127 million in commitments.
The stage disappeared. The purpose did not.
That may be one of the clearest lessons of the past 14 years: Global Citizen was never the concert. The concert was one way of bringing people into the work.
The movement is what people do next.
One Action Becomes Millions
No single action tells the whole story. The power comes from what happens when millions of people choose to act together, and those actions help create momentum for measurable change.
In 2025, Global Citizens took 4.3 million actions through Protect the Amazon, helping build public engagement and momentum around a campaign that mobilized more than $1 billion in commitments to safeguard the rainforest and support Indigenous Peoples and local communities who help protect it. Those commitments are set to protect or restore 31 million hectares and impact 18 million lives.
That same year, Scaling Up Renewables in Africa brought governments, investors, businesses, organizations, and citizens together around a significant opportunity and challenge: Africa holds significant renewable energy potential, while millions of people across the continent still lack access to electricity.
By the campaign’s culmination in Johannesburg, commitments had been announced that are expected to help power more than 17.5 million homes and deliver 26.8 gigawatts of renewable energy across Africa by 2030.
And today, another idea is taking shape through the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund.
Football can fill stadiums and stop cities in their tracks. But what if some of that extraordinary global attention could also create opportunities for children long after the final whistle?
In just over a year, the Fund has mobilized more than $60 million. It is supporting 58 community-based organizations whose work is expected to reach more than 400,000 children with access to quality education and sport.
A rainforest, a solar panel, a football and a classroom. They may seem like separate stories. But they are connected by a question Global Citizen has been asking for 14 years:
What becomes possible when people decide that somebody else’s future matters to them?
There Is a Place for You Here
A movement does not belong to its founders. It does not belong to the people on its stages, the leaders making commitments, or the organizations whose names appear on a campaign.
A movement belongs to the people who keep it moving. That means you.
Whether you have taken hundreds of actions with Global Citizen or are discovering this community for the first time, belonging here does not require you to be an expert.
It asks you to participate, learn, ask questions, and stay engaged.
To use your voice alongside people you may never meet, because you believe that where somebody is born should not limit their opportunity to learn, live safely, breathe clean air, access electricity, or build a future they choose.
Fourteen years ago, that might have meant signing a petition for a ticket to a concert. Today, it can begin with the phone already in your hand.
Download the Global Citizen app. Choose an issue that matters to you. Read. Learn. Sign a petition. Send a message to a decision-maker. Share an action with somebody else.
Then come back and take another. Not because your action alone will solve the problem. But because you are not alone. That is the point.
In a time when it can be easy to focus on what separates us, being a Global Citizen is a decision to remember what connects us.
The world has changed in 14 years. Our belief in one another hasn’t. Join the movement. Take action. There is a place for you here.