The decisions that shape whether children attend school, families have reliable electricity, and communities can access essential health services are often made in spaces far removed from everyday life. They require policy frameworks, financing, international cooperation, and organizations responsible for implementation.
Young people remain underrepresented in many formal decision-making institutions. The world has approximately 1.2 billion people between the ages of 15 and 24, but only 2.8% of the world’s parliamentarians are aged 30 or younger. More than 37% of parliamentary chambers have no members in that age group at all.
Pop culture can help close that gap. Music, film, sport, and digital culture can bring public policy issues into the spaces where people already spend their time. Policy provides the plans, partnerships, and resources needed for implementation; pop culture gives more people a way into the conversation.
This is the thinking behind our pop-and-policy model. Each serves a different purpose, but together they connect public participation with decision-making.
Pop Culture Can Make Policy Personal
Policy can sound abstract until its effects are visible in everyday life.
Around 250 million children and young people are out of school, according to UNESCO, while 57% of children worldwide lack basic skills. Nearly 750 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity, with more than 80% living in Africa.
Behind those figures are decisions about public spending, infrastructure, international finance, and which programs receive support. These challenges cannot be addressed through individual choices alone. They require policy and long-term investment.
People also need opportunities to understand how an issue affects their lives and what progress could look like. Pop culture can play a role in presenting that information in familiar formats.
Artists can use their reach to introduce public policy issues, encourage audiences to learn more, and share ways to participate. Their role within this model is different from that of experts, policymakers, and delivery organizations.
Concerts, sporting events, and digital platforms can also present policy issues in formats that are familiar to younger audiences.
Policy Turns Participation Into a Plan
Public participation can give an issue momentum, but achieving results requires detailed work.
Governments decide how public resources are allocated and which policies are adopted. Researchers and policy experts help identify approaches supported by evidence — a process the OECD recognizes as an important part of public policymaking. Businesses and philanthropists determine where they can contribute funding, technology, or expertise, while delivery organizations bring local knowledge and turn commitments into programs.
This type of cooperation matters because global challenges rarely fall within the responsibility of one sector. The United Nations identifies multi-stakeholder partnerships as vehicles for sharing financial resources, knowledge, expertise, and technology in support of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Policy gatherings create space for these groups to examine challenges, align around shared priorities, and announce or advance commitments. Events like Global Citizen NOW bring together participants from government, business, philanthropy, and culture for discussions about policy, investment, and partnerships.
These gatherings are not separate from cultural moments such as Global Citizen Festival. They are complementary parts of the same model. Policy forums provide room for substantive discussion and coordination, while festivals and other cultural platforms bring campaign priorities and proposed solutions to a wider public.
It is not a question of whether the policy table or the festival stage is more important. They are designed to serve different purposes. The opportunity lies in connecting them.
What Makes This Different From a Benefit Concert?
Benefit concerts have a long history of bringing people together and raising funds in response to humanitarian emergencies and other public issues. Audiences are generally invited to attend, watch, and donate.
Global Citizen Festival follows a different structure. For Global Citizens who earn Festival tickets through the action-reward model, participation begins before the event.
Global Citizens complete action journeys through the Global Citizen app or website. They might learn about an issue, sign a petition, contact a decision-maker, write a letter, share an informed message, or volunteer. These actions earn points that can be used for a chance to attend the Festival.
Alongside this public participation, Global Citizen works with governments, businesses, philanthropists, and delivery partners on defined policy and funding goals. The Festival provides a public platform for commitments to be announced, while the engagement supporting those commitments often begins before the event. Global Citizen also reports on commitments and their delivery through its impact and accountability process.
This is one distinction between the Global Citizen Festival and a traditional benefit-concert model. In addition to any fundraising connected to the event, the Global Citizen model includes public actions, policy engagement, financial commitments, and implementation partnerships.
From Public Action to Measurable Results
The model has developed over more than a decade.
At the inaugural Global Citizen Festival in New York City in 2012, 60,000 people gathered on Central Park’s Great Lawn after taking action through Global Citizen’s campaigns. More than $1.3 billion in commitments related to extreme poverty, malaria, and polio were announced in connection with the inaugural campaign.
Ahead of Global Citizen Festival: India in 2016, more than 500,000 Global Citizens took 2 million actions. Commitments associated with the campaign totaled $5 billion for sanitation, education, health, and related priorities, with the potential to affect more than 220 million lives.
In 2018, Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 in Johannesburg followed more than 5.65 million actions. Global Citizen later reported that $7.67 billion in commitments connected to the campaign had been distributed, affecting nearly 122 million lives across Africa.
The model has continued to evolve. During the 2025 Global Citizen Festival campaign, Global Citizens took 4.3 million actions — the highest total recorded for the New York Festival campaign. Commitments connected to the campaign included more than $140 million for children’s education and nutrition, as well as renewable energy commitments expected to power more than 4.6 million homes across Africa by 2030.
To date, close to $50 billion in commitments made through our platform and events has been deployed, affecting a reported 1.3 billion lives worldwide. Those figures cover work carried out through governments, funders, and delivery partners over many years. The Festival is one public moment within that longer process, rather than the point at which implementation happens.
Why Young People Need a Way In
Young people do not need to become policy specialists to take part in the decisions shaping their future. But they do need opportunities to understand how those decisions affect their lives, who can influence them, and which forms of participation are available.
The United Nations Youth Office recognizes sustained youth participation as an important part of policymaking, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
Global Citizen’s action journeys combine information about an issue with steps such as signing petitions, writing to political representatives, sharing messages, and volunteering. This approach creates a route from learning about an issue to participating in a campaign.
The UN’s Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation similarly emphasize youth participation across agenda-setting, decision-making, implementation, and review.
The pop-and-policy model does not treat culture, public participation, and policymaking as substitutes for one another. It gives each a different role. Pop culture can broaden the conversation, policy can establish plans and funding, and public participation can connect people with the decisions shaping their lives.