What an incredible year. 
I want to start by saying a huge thank you to everyone who took action on our key campaigns in 2014. We’ve been overwhelmed by the outstanding progress made this year to achieve our vision of a world without extreme poverty. 
Global Citizen is not even one year old in the UK, and we already have thousands visiting the site monthly, reading and digesting content, sharing it and taking action on our key campaigns. We’ve been fortunate to work with influential partners who have helped amplify and build our ambition of a truly global movement to end extreme poverty. And I want to thank them too. 
But let’s start with what’s important – the progress to eradicate extreme poverty. 

Securing 0.7% of spending in the UK Budget, and then UK law

In March of this year we launched the Global Citizen online platform in the UK. Using our relationships with the music industry, we managed to secure nearly 100 of the world’s biggest artists to give us two free tickets to their UK gigs. Global Citizens could win these tickets simply by taking action on our key campaigns. 
That first victory, to convince the Chancellor, George Osborne to announce that the government would fulfill a long standing commitment to spend 0.7% of our national income on saving a life every two minutes, was a real victory for Global Citizens, including One Direction! 
Thousands of you tweeted Chancellor Osborne, shared content on the importance of aid spending and wrote emails to the Prime Minister, Secretary of State and the Chancellor. The campaign was so widely felt as the Chancellor stood down from the dispatch box after making the announcement, he immediately tweeted One Direction thanking them for their support!
And then just a few weeks ago, we jumped on the campaign wagon again to help push through a Bill in Parliament that would enshrine 0.7% in law. This would mean the debate around the amount we spend could end and we could focus on the important work of ending extreme poverty by 2030. 
You emailed your local MPs in your hundreds, urging them to attend the debate and vote in favour. We won by 146-5 and enshrined saving a life every 2 mins into law for the foreseeable future. 

Live Below the Line

In March of this year we launched our 4th Live Below the Line campaign. Partnering with some of the UKs biggest charities, we challenged the UK public to live on just £1 a day for their food and drink for a week to raise money for and awareness of, extreme poverty issues. 
More than 6000 people took the challenge, raising around £1m for life changing and life saving projects right across the globe. On Twitter, the campaign went to scale with thousands of tweets of boiled rice, pasta with ketchup and numerous unsatisfied, grouchy faces! 
The campaign will be kicking off again in early 2015, you can pre-register your interest in taking part here. 

Write to Learn

Every child should have the right to learn, but 57 million children still lack access to primary and early secondary education – a real outrage in 2014. So, together with Plan UK and RESULTS UK, we created the Write to Learn campaign to convince the UK government to fund global education. 
We launched this event online using our campaign hashtag #becauseofschool. The response was truly amazing. Thousands upon thousands of people started tweeting about what they’d achieved in life #becauseofschool, celebrities and world leaders joined in – people from all over the world contributed. Global Citizen’s took the lead not only tweeting but emailing the Minister responsible. 
We sent so many tweets we got a complaint from the Minister’s office!
But in the end our efforts really paid off and the UK government pledged £300m to global education. That’ll go a very long way to giving every child access to school and as a result, march us towards a world without extreme poverty. 

Gavi Replenishment

Our final major campaign of the year was on vaccines. The world is coming together in January 2015 to fund global vaccine initiatives like Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, and we wanted to seize this opportunity. 
Once again Global Citizens stepped up and hustled hard to get the UK government to show leadership. We had the chance to save 1.4 million lives and vaccinate 300 million children AND WE DID IT! A massive £1 billion was pledged by the UK government to end unnecessary child deaths in the poorest parts of the world. 
Our emails, tweets, messages, content, blogs, meetings really made a difference here and we couldn’t be happier. 
So an unbelievably successful year. Let’s just recap that again, shall we? 
-We enshrined into law aid funding that saves a life every two seconds
-We save 1.4 million lives through our Gavi lobbying
-We secured £300m to global education to give millions of children access to school 
-We challenged ourselves and raised £1m for poverty-fighting causes around the world
Not bad for 12 months work, huh? 

So what’s next?

Next year is a seriously big year for the world’s poorest people. Our leaders are writing the world’s ‘to do list’ for a generation. Working in our name, they’re setting goals for how we’re going to end extreme poverty by 2030, tackle inequality and environmental destruction. 
This is our one chance and we’re going to take it, so stayed tuned because we have some huge plans for 2015!
I hope you’ve been inspired by our collective efforts this year, and that you’ll continue to be part of the movement to end extreme poverty. Or even better, why don’t you share this piece with your friends and challenge them to join the Global Citizen movement? 
A huge thank you from the entire Global Citizen UK team. 
Stephen Brown
Director of Europe

Editorial

Demand Equity

2014 year in review, and a huge thank you!

By Stephen Brown