March 9, 2023 • 44 mins
When Hugh Evans was 14, he spent one night in a Manila slum as part of a school trip.
Surrounded by crawling cockroaches and rancid garbage, he tossed and turned while his host, a local boy, slept soundly. Hugh realized the only reason the boy slept there, and not in his comfortable Melbourne home, was a lottery of fate. Hugh made a vow to himself that night - he would dedicate his life to eradicating extreme poverty. As the co-founder and CEO of Global Citizen, Hugh is spearheading a movement to overcome poverty via actions, not charity. In this episode of Out of Office, he explains how Global Citizen operates, the difference it's making, and why celebrities from Chris Martin to Beyonce to Miley Cyrus are supporters.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, and welcome to Out of Office. I'm your host,
Malika Kupoor my guest today. Hugh Evans is a co
founder and CEO of Global Citizen. You probably no Global
Citizen from its mega concerts, which feature the likes of
Chris Martin, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Preanca Chopra Jonas. All
this star power serves one purpose to bring awareness to
(00:27):
Global citizens goal, which is to eradicate extreme poverty. Many
would say that's pretty ambitious, and Hugh agrees. But since
poverty is man made, he says, we are the ones
who can overcome it. It doesn't require charity, it needs
urgent action. Global Citizen calls on people around the world
to do something. Send a letter to a president, tweet
(00:51):
at a prime minister, canvas campaign, lobby people in positions
of power to make systemic changes at alleviate poverty in
their pockets of the world. Global Citizen has millions of
members and support from an incredible list of a plus
celebrities that include politicians, philanthropists, CEOs, movie stars, and pop stars.
(01:11):
I've met Hugh a few times over the past few years,
and I've always been struck by his conviction that this
is the way to alleviate extreme poverty. And I get
the feeling he's not going to give up on that
goal ever, because doing that with break a vow he
made to his fourteen year old self when he spent
a night in a Manilla slum as part of a
school trip. There were cockroaches, there was garbage, the place
(01:35):
smelt bad, but the boy next to him, who lived
in that slum slept soundly. Melbourne Borne, Hugh realized the
only reason that boy slept there every night and he
didn't was the lottery of fate. That's when Hugh decided
this is what he was going to spend his life doing,
eradicating extreme poverty. He has Hugh Evans on Out of Office.
(02:01):
You're welcome to Out of Office. Thank you so much
for having me today. You've said your life's goal is
to eradicate extreme poverty around the world. You've had celebrities
everyone from Lady Gaga to Chris Martin join you in
your mission, and of course we'll talk about their role
in a few minutes. But first I want to go
back in time. I want to go back and meet
(02:23):
fourteen year old Hugh who spent the night in a
Manila slam which really set you down this path you're on.
What was it like, What did you see, what did
you smell? What did you hear? Well, what happened was
I was in my first year of high school. I
(02:43):
was twelve thirteen years old, and a lady from a
charity came and spoke at our school about raising money
for communities in the developing world. And when you're that age,
when well, when I was that age, I was quite
an eager young kid and I put up my hand
and I said, Okay, I want to see a buck
and raise some money. And I was so enthusiastic. I
knocked on every single door in the neighborhood. I asked
(03:04):
everyone I possibly could, and I ended up raising the
most amount of money of any kid in Australia. And
so the charity sent me to the Philippines to learn
more about issues of global development. And there was one
night in the Philippines that changed my life forever. In
a slum called Smoky Mountain, It's a slum built on
(03:25):
top of a rubbish dump in the center of Manila,
and this whole community revolves around scavenging. So the kids
every single day run after the garbage trucks try to
get bits of scrap metal, piece of food and things
that they can recycle. And that night I was placed
in the care of a kid in my own age.
His name is Sunny Boy. We were both fourteen at
the time, but where I'd come from, just middle class
(03:49):
Melbourne in Australia. He had tattoos on his forearm at
the age of fourteen because he was about to become
his gang leader, and that was his form of initiation.
And that night he took me to his house and
we cooked this meal together with some food that I
brought with me. But when it came time to go
to sleep, I'll never forget he just cleared away the
pots and pans on the ground and we lay down,
(04:10):
myself and Sunny Boy in the rest of his family,
seven of us in this long line, and we just
lay there that night. I'll never forget it, with the
smell of rubbish all around uscars we're on a garbage
dump and cockroaches crawling around us. And I didn't sleep
that night, but I lay awake thinking to myself, you know,
it really is pure chance that I was born where
(04:33):
I was born, and he was born where he was born.
As Warren Buffett calls it, it's the Ovarian lottery. We
don't deserve our lottery in life. And so I decided
that night that I was going to commit my life
to seeing what could be done to eradicate extreme poverty
within our lifetime. And that's been my lifet journey ever since.
(04:53):
Do you know where Sunny Boy is now? I do,
because he actually messages me every day now on Facebook Messenger.
So so, so what happened was I lost touch with
him because he gave it was nineteen ninety eight, ninety seven.
I was there and he gave me his number on
(05:16):
a piece of paper, and my mum put my jeans
through the washing and I lost the piece of paper,
and so I actually assumed I was never going to
be able to be in touch with him ever again.
And then twenty years later I was invited to do
a TED talk and some great group of great couple
from the Netherlands who actually lived in the Philippines. Now
(05:37):
they saw my Ted talk and they said, we think
we know whose Sunny Boy is. And I honestly couldn't
believe it. And so I a year later it was
invited to fly back to Philippines properly for the first
time in twenty years, and sure enough I was reunited
with him, and I mean I was in tears. He
was crying, like it was kind of unbelievable. Like the
(05:59):
strange thing was that he said that I had had
an impact in his life as well, which was meant.
I thought I was just another person that he would
never remember. But but we both remembered each other as vividly.
It was yes as yesterday, and so we were The
first hour was just we were in tears of joy
and and and then you know, and then and then
(06:22):
it became practical, you know, I was wanted to find
out how he's doing. What had happened is that the
Manila authorities decided the land that Smoky Mountain was built on,
because it was near the water, was actually very valuable land,
so they did they didn't want it to be used
for a scavenging anymore, and they tried to relocate Sunny
(06:43):
Boy and his family out of that community. So I
set up a small fund to start to help all
of his kids to go to school, as well as
for him to buy a rickshaw, so we had a
source of income and for him and his wife, and lease,
we set up a shop front in front of their
(07:03):
homes so they could start to have their own form
of commerce. Because I've always believed that the best way
to alleviate poverty is through giving people an opportunity to
lift themselves out of extreme poverty. And and so we
wanted to do something that was sustainable. And you know,
he sends me the most beautiful messages. He's like, he's
just the most lovely guy. And I mean, he but
(07:26):
you know, I got to tell you that life isn't
easy just because just because he has the support. You know,
like during COVID, like everyone else, he wasn't able to
work because because you know, the Manila Authority, the authorities
decided that rickshaw drivers could only drive every odor even day,
depending on their license plate. And so it you know,
(07:50):
you see how things that affect you and I have
a much greater profound impact on those living extreme poverty
because they're living on the edge of existence already. So
if you take away that livelihood, you take away their school,
you take away their food security, you take away in
the access to healthcare, and it has a snowball effect.
And that's the challenge of extreme poverty, you know, helping
(08:14):
people graduate out of living on less than one dollar
ninety per day to having their own job and then
ultimately growing from a small enterprise into a larger enterprise
so they can actually support their family and their community.
How do you define extreme poverty? What's the difference between
poverty and extreme poverty? Well, you know, poverty as a
(08:37):
notion is relative, right, so you know, someone could be
poorer than someone else, but both of them could be
relatively affluent. So it's not actually helpful to talk about
it in terms of poverty. I find I always focus on,
you know, the weld banked definition of those living on
less than US one dollar ninety per day. But it's
(08:57):
much better to think about it in terms of the
in the inputs that are needed to alleviate poverty, which
is obviously food security, water and sanitation, healthcare. We're not
just talking about polio, We're talking about HIV, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis,
all the leading killers of kids under the age of five.
(09:17):
We're talking about water and sanitation, and we're talking about
the empowerment of girls and women. And increasingly the world
is seeing the nexus between climate change and extreme poverty.
Because ultimately, you know, when a huge hurricane comes through
a poor community or a natural disasters who've just seen
in Turkey, it has a disproportionate effect on the poor
(09:41):
because they don't have the infrastructure to begin with, and
so or safe infrastructure to begin with. And so that's
where you can wipe and tire GDP points off. The
economy is simply through natural disasters, and why we need
to understand the nexus between climate change and extreme poverty.
So you had this experience in Manila. You went back
(10:03):
to Australia, but it seems like you were on this
journey from from that day on, right, and you went
and spent a year in India. I didn't know you
went to Woodstock in Missouri. I did. Yeah, it was
I have a lot of friends who went there. You do.
That's great, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's Missouri is beautiful, right,
(10:24):
the hill stations of India, it is. It is. So yeah.
I came back and I came back at the end
of that time in the Philippines and I said to
my mum, you know, this is my life's journey now,
and she was a bit of gas. You didn't know
how to take that, and I said, that's exactly where
(10:45):
I was going to go with this question, which is
you're this regular kid in Melbourne, right, and then you
start making these really unconventional choices. You go to India.
Then after that you spent your gap year in Africa.
How did your family react? Well, well, not not so well,
to be honest, My mom my mum hated the idea.
I remember I said to her, I'm going to go
(11:06):
and live for a year in India and she said,
you know, there's no there's no way that's going to happen.
I said, well, I'll if I can do you a deal,
if I can apply for a scholarship to go to
Woodstock School and the Himalayas so that it doesn't cost
Because you know, our family wasn't super well off. We
were just middle class from Melbourne and so m so
we obviously couldn't afford for me to go. And so
(11:28):
I said, if I can get a full scholarship, will
you let me go? And she said, okay, deal, And
so I worked as hard as I possibly could and
got this scholarship and and I'll never forget the day
I jumped on the airplane from Melbourne through Singapore onto Delhi,
about to catch the Shatabdi Express up up to the Himalayas.
(11:50):
And I remember I jumped on the airplane. I was
a fifteen year old kid. I was by myself, and
I sat next to this big businessman and I remember
I looked him up in the eyes and I completely
burst into tears. I was so scared because I realized
what had happened to me. I was like, okay, I
can't I can't speak to my parents anymore for another year.
So and it was before the days of like data
(12:12):
service or proper cell phones, so that like and there
was no reception in the Himalayas, right and so and
so so like Mum would hate it, like she would
try to call me and it wouldn't go through ever.
And you know, and I remember the day I arrived
into into Woodstock and a couple of crazy things happened,
(12:35):
you know, both really formative things for me, but in
both a good way in a bad way, I guess. Um. Firstly,
I arrived in my bed that I was going to
be sleeping on had a spider infestation. And so I
remember I remember the Dawnmaster whacking hundreds of spiders under
my bed and then just put it back and said, okay,
(12:55):
go to bed now. And then and then the second
thing that happened was I had my first introduction to
communal bathrooms because like I grew up in like private Australia.
And then and like first day in the bathroom, and
all of a sudden, like I'm like, okay, I lost
my sense of self consciousness. And but also something really
(13:17):
tragic happened. Like two weeks after I arrived. I was
just playing up at the school with my friend John.
You know, were both fifteen year old kids, students, just playing,
and all of a sudden, a car fell over the
cud fell over the cliff face. And you know, there's
no ambulance service in that region, right, and so me
and my friend John ran down and tried to act
(13:41):
as the first responders to it. Just tragic, tragic, tragic
scene where a man had was wedged between the fork
of a tree hanging over the cliff. And you know,
we we with a few others. I ran up and
got a stretcher from the school. We placed him in
(14:01):
the back of a car and try and John jumped
in the back to try to give him mouth to
mouth resuscitation, but the man, you know, tragically passed away
an hour later. And I that night, I just, I mean,
call me naive, and maybe I was, but like I
just it hit me that night how fragile life is.
(14:23):
And I was like, okay, this is where I live now,
this is a different you know. It just it shifted
my shifted my gears entirely, Like I think, I went
to India very much as a self conscious fifteen year
old student and came back with the realization that in
those days, you know, two thirds of people in India
(14:44):
were homeless or slum dwellers. That's it was thirty nine
times Australia's population homeless or slum dwellers. So it hit
me that the scale of the challenge couldn't be solved
through traditional charity. Like I in some ways became a
little more my eyes were more widely open to the
limitations of traditional charity. It hit me that no amount
(15:05):
of black tie gala dinners or nice fundraisers were ever
going to solve a three point five trillion dollar challenged,
and so I had to think about it differently. And
it was that year in India that changed my perspective
on things. And you have chosen a rather non traditional way.
And your way is, like you said, you don't get
(15:26):
people to donate money, but you get people to take action.
Tell us a little bit about this model. How does
it work well. Our model was inspired by one of
the final speeches that Nelson Mandela gave back in two
thousand and five in Trafalgar Square when he helped launch
the Make Poverty History campaign, and he said at the time,
(15:49):
he said that overcoming poverty it's not a gesture of charity,
but it's an act of justice. He then said, like
slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural, it's man aiding
can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
And I love though that speech because in that speech
lies two hugely important truths. Firstly that extreme poverty is
(16:12):
the systemic issue, not a aritable challenge, and secondly that
it can be overcome by action taking, as he said.
And so what we decide to do was to leverage
the power of citizen action taking at scale. We created
an app, the Global Citizen App, where citizens would download
it and call on world leaders. In Unison. We have
(16:34):
millions of members, so let's say we're all calling on
the same world leader at once to make a multibillion
dollar pledge to that specific issue area. One great example
is a couple of years ago, we launched what we
call the Twitter Invasion of Norway with Stephen Colbert, and
we had so many global citizens call on Prime Minister
(16:54):
Ernest Solberg of Norway when she was in power to
be one of the first Scandinavian countries to support girls
education globally properly at scale. And I remember we launched
this campaign one night and I got a call from
the Chief of staff the next day saying, cancel all
the tweets. We can't see any tweets from the Norwegian
people because we're getting too many from global citizens and
(17:16):
in the middle of an election, we need to stop
the tweets. And they said, come to Oslo, and so
we we flew to Oslo. We sat down with the
Prime Minister and we said, would you champion global partnership
for education and she said okay, and she came on
global citizen stage and made a two hundred and fifty
million dollar commitment. And that's how the model works. We
(17:38):
show that it's much more effective to create systemic change
through actions, and it's through achieving that its scale. So
we now have eleven and a half million members around
the world, and all of those members take action, and
music is a very important platform for you as well.
And very often so when people make these actions, then
(18:01):
they earn a reward right and that's often a past
to one of a global citizen experience. For example, one
of your ultra famous music concerts that you hold around
the world. And we'll talk about the concerts in a minute.
But why why music? Well, music has always been the
anthem of movements throughout all of social history. So if
(18:22):
you think about a song like Amazing Grace that inspired
the late William Wilberforce Um and you know, it's a
it's a story of redemption. A person that that was
a slave trader decided that he had um. You know,
he says that saved a wrench like me. You know,
he called himself a wrench for everything that he had
(18:43):
done to hurt humanity. Or if you think about, you know,
the anti apartheid movement and the March on Pretoria, it
was it was the anthem. You know, often the Zulu
or Cossa anthems at the time that inspired the solidarity movement,
and I believe that the same is true right now.
(19:03):
You know, music can be that great catalyzer. In the
way that we've used it a Global Citizen is that
we've partnered with the world's biggest musicians to provide scalable
incentives for citizens to take action so they can come
to the Global Citizen Festival for free. We said, we
don't want your money, we want you to take action.
We want action to be your currency. So the more
(19:26):
actions you take, the greater the likelihood that you'll be
able to come to the Global Citizen Festival. But through
our partnership with Live Nation and Ticketmaster, you can now
earn rewards to every great artist show around the world.
And in fact, we're driving more actions through the Global
Citizen app than through any of our festivals. So while
our festivals are really high profile year round, citizens are
(19:49):
taking action every second of every day. And so that's
actually how you create sustainable change because movements can't come
and go. It's not like there's less urgent. See just
because an issue falls out of the headlines. We need
to create that sense of urgency and the only way
you can do that is using the power of technology
powered by the anthem of music year round. So since
(20:11):
your audience they aren't buying tickets to attend these music concerts,
which have the biggest names in the world, how do
you fund them? Well, we work with great philanthropists. So
for example, Bloomberg Philanthropies alongside the Bill and Melindigates Foundation
supported our global goal Unite for our Future campaign in
(20:33):
twenty and twenty when we were focused on the issue
of financing vaccine equity around the world during the pandemic.
We also work with ethical organizations and corporations that actually
want to make a difference in the world. So amazing
groups like Accenture or City Bank, or Cisco or Procter
(20:55):
and Gamble or Verizon or Delta Airlines who've partnered with us,
And the cool thing about the way they work with
Global Citizen is they say, you know what, we want
a partner with you to help reach the whole world
with this message of good which is for me. Is
really positive because it shows that Global Citizen doesn't partner
with sorry, doesn't doesn't compete with a normal NGO. It's
(21:19):
not like we're going out and trying to take the
money that you know someone would want to give to
a n a set for Save the Children. Right, we
don't ask consumers for their dollars, but instead we're going
to brands and saying, could you give us marketing support
and marketing dollars that you might otherwise allocate to, say
(21:40):
a sporting event, because wouldn't it be much better than
just funding a sporting event, actually spun something that can
actually change the world. And these brands do and they go, okay, cool,
we love sports, so we'll still allocate some money for
sport over here, but we'll also allocate money so that
we can actually support Global Citizen to have a huge impact.
And that's why they're able to support us over the
(22:02):
long haul, which is actually a far better model because
it means that we're not running from pillar to post
just trying to fundraise all the time. We're actually able
to be strategic, and so when an issue hits the
world like the pandemic did, or like the war in
Ukraine did, Global Citizen is equipped to respond because we
have a team at the ready who's able to rapidly
(22:24):
respond to the world's greatest challenges. And we're finding that
these brands are stepping up in ways that you wouldn't
even imagine, whether it's their commitment to the Race to zero,
to cutting their own carbon emissions, or working with us
as we have with Procter and Gamble on period of
poverty around the world, or genuinely trying to close the
digital dividers. We've seen with Cisco and Verizon. You know,
(22:46):
we've seen how brands are like, Okay, we want to
integrate not just our purpose work, but actually integrate that
into our business model. And so that's been a really
exciting evolution that we're seeing. You have a new experience
coming up and approv tell us about that. Well, this
is something that we've been working on for a long time,
and I know the dream here and it's called Global
(23:11):
Citizen Now is We wanted to create a moment to
bring together the best leaders in activism and the NGO world,
the best leaders in the corporate world, the best leaders
in the political world, and the best leaders in the
artist world, all under one roof. But instead of it
becoming a talk fest like so many of those conferences are,
(23:34):
we decided that our whole mantra would be about turning
ideas into impact and driving urgent change to end Extreme
Poverty Now. So on April twenty seven to twenty eighth,
we're hosting Global Citizen Now. It's going to be our
two days summit in New York City. It's the second
year we're hosting it. Last year we were thrilled that
incredible activists like for Ell Williams and Glorious Dynham and
(23:57):
President bonder Line and Chuck Robbins of Cisco all came
along to help us kick it off. And this year,
you know where couldn't be happier that you know, President
bonder Line is coming back, Hugh Jackman and Chris Martin
are going to be there. Um you know Prime Minister
Mia Motley of Barbados, who's become an amazing champion for
what's called the Bridgetown Agenda of Climate financing, as well
(24:20):
as you know Nana Cooper Addu, the President of Ghana,
and an extraordinary group of private sector leaders like Hahns Vesberg,
the chairman and CEO Verizon near By Day who's the
co CEO of Bridgewater and Associates, fran Katsutas, who's the
chief people officer at Cisco. You know, we're bringing together
this extraordinary group of of amazing leaders. But everything is
(24:43):
focused on action taking and everything is focused on impact.
So we're not going to host a single panel unless
there's an action to be taken out of it. When
you go to these celebrities, Chris Martin, I know, has
been a big part of your campaign from pretty much
the start great from the start of Global Citizen. What's
(25:03):
your bitch? What do you say to them? How do
you manage to get every alister to join you? For us,
it's all about can we measure impact? Right? You know,
because life's too short, there's no point us running. I
don't actually believe in the concept of awareness raising. I
think people already know that extreme poverty exists, They just
(25:25):
need to know how to change it. Right. People already
know that climate change is happening, they just need to
know how to change it. So if we can't bring
a solution to our artist partners, then we're not a
good partner to them. So every time we do a briefing,
we sit down with Chris Martin, or with Hugh Jackman,
or with Beyonce or princachuper Jonas, we bring to that
(25:47):
conversation a set of policy outcomes that we are committed
to achieving a campaign timeline in which we're going to
achieve it, and a set of milestones along the way,
and so they can go, okay, am I truly enlisted
in this like So, for example, early on in the pandemic,
when Chris Martin started jamming in his house around the
(26:08):
Together at Home concert, we said, okay, we have to
raise money to support PPE because at that stage, frontline
community healthcare workers desperately needed funding just for basic things
like masks and face shields and so on, and gloves
and so on and so forth. And so when Lady
Gaga came to us and we had that conversation with
(26:28):
her and doctor Ted Ross, the head of the who
around turning this into one world Together at Home, we said, okay,
let's sit down and let's host round tables and get
every corporation to commit one by one, and we got
Apple's CEO committed ten million dollars on the spot, you know,
like it was extraordinary generosity, And we got one hundred
(26:49):
and twenty seven point nine million dollars raised in just
a few days and broke two world records in the
Guinness World Records because of the focus on outcomes. And
then we have an impact measurement team whose entire job
it is to track the follow through of those commitments
to make sure that those dollars and those supplies in
(27:10):
this case it was ppe ends up in the hands
of those who need it most. And so that's our model.
We bring to an artist a real solution, and we
track that solution, and we say, how can we make
this scalable? I just fully believe with all my heart
that if we just host more gala dinners, as nice
(27:30):
as they are, we'll be hosting gala dinners till all
of eternity and will have not made a dent in
extreme poverty. Let's flip the model and let's see how
advocacy can leverage public resource tied with private resource at scale.
Because we need trillions of dollars to end extreme poverty.
It's not going to be solved just through the good
(27:54):
feelings that you and I might get through building a
single water well here or a school there, and by
the way, that's important and those that infrastructure needs to exist.
But we must finance it. What I'm trying to get as,
we must finance it at scale. We can't be financing
it through just short term transactions. You know, all the
(28:15):
actions people take, they're they're directed towards the un sustainable
development goals, whether it's education or gender discrimination, health, these
these important issues. What would have happened if you just
picked one issue of just why not just pick one Education?
We focus obviously on the the the macro challenge of
(28:38):
any in extreme poverty. The key thing to realize is
that these issues are deeply interconnected and if you were
to focus just on one issue, that same issue will
be very quickly undermined by another. Let me give you
an example. So take Barbados, a low to middle income
country that is you know now has a great democratically
(28:59):
elect leader in Prime Minister Motley, who's doing so much
to try to champion their economy. And let's say you
and I, to your logic, want to focus just on
the issue of job creation for example. Okay, so that
was our issue. We went job creation, We're going to support,
so we developed all the inputs, we supported the Farmers
(29:20):
Association in Barbados, so on and so forth. Then all
of a sudden, a hurricane comes through and it wipes
out all of the infrastructure of Barbados for months and
is completely destroyed because you and I had taken our
eye off the prize and we hadn't really focused on
the interconnected of these issues. We're just focused on one issue.
All of a sudden, those people are going to be
(29:41):
out of work for months, they're going to be complaining
of months, and they'll be pushed straight back into extreme poverty.
So single issue advocacy, while important, is incomplete. The second
thing I'd say is that it also ignores how global
funding cycles work. Because every five years the world raises
money need to fight HIV, AIDS, malarum tuberculosis for the
(30:02):
Global Fund or then gave the Vaccine Alliance or the
IF and replenishment, sorry, the either replenishment of the World Bank.
So if we just focused on one issue in the
intervening four years, are we're just going to let people
suffer and just twiddle our thumbs. I don't think so.
I think that's where we actually need to understand how
global funding cycles work and understand how one, if you
(30:25):
don't address these issues in an interconnected fashion, they will
undermine each other. And two we actually have the opportunity
to find those moments, those rare political moments where the
right confluence of good leadership comes together with good public
policy to do the right thing. Perfect example is this
year in June when President mccron, alongside Prime Minister Motley
(30:48):
and several other world leaders have agreed to host the
Summit on Climate Financing. This isn't the year where we're
raising money for the Global Fund, This isn't the year
were of raising money for GAVE. It's the moment where
we can focus on two big things, both climate financing
and the sixteen point five billion dollar financing gap under
the Paris Climate Change a Chord. But secondly, we can
(31:08):
also focus on the issue of equitable access to financing
through the developing world more broadly, because for too long
the World Bank has been missing in action and they're
two trillion dollars in reserve assets, have been sitting there
doing nothing, and the balance sheet has not been stretched
because you've had a leader under Malpass, who fortunately is
now resigned, who wasn't really committed to global development. And
(31:30):
so this is where my point is, you can't just
let people suffer. You have to choose those moments where
you can have real breakthroughs. And every year provides a
new moment for a breakthrough. Looking back. What are you
proudest of in Global citizens journey so far? I'm proudest
of our team, you know, like when I like, we
(31:53):
still have the like the small team that started in
the early days, you know, like our co founder Mayor
Can Simon and Quaku and and Liza and Caroline and
you know, our broader team. You know, everyone who's involved
has been involved for like, you know, almost more than
ten years, you know, like they've really dedicated their their
(32:16):
their lives to it. Like and you know, our founding chairperson, Beater,
he you know, he was involved for the first eleven
years and he's still involved on the purpose because because
it's like, even though he retired as chairman, he wanted
to stay involved. So I think, like what I find
in our team, we always have this this this internal
(32:38):
dialogue of saying, are we truly putting the Mitchen first?
And if we ever lose sight of that, then woe
was asked. You know, we've got to always keep that
as our true north UM. And it can be hard
because you know, when you grow as an organization UM,
and you know, you take on new challenges and and
lots of more staff, you know, it can be easy
to focus on the process rather than the outcome. I
(33:00):
remember our founding chairman first said to me, you never
ever lose sight of the track that you're trying to
build a movement, not an institution. There's tons of institutions
that are fat and bloated and do nothing. Your goal
is to build an agile movement that never loses its
focus on the mission. And so I believe in fifteen
(33:21):
years time, when we've eradicated extreme poverty, global citizen should
not need to exist anymore. We can have one final
concert as a celebration in Central Park, but then we
should close outdoors because because that's got to be our
true north, that's got to be our modus operandi, that's
got to be the way in which we drive ourselves.
Are we any closer to ending global poverty than we
(33:43):
were when you first launched? So there's good news and
bad news. The good news is when I was born
in nineteen eighty three, fifty two percent of the planet
lived in extreme poverty, and over the last thirty years
that actually reduced to only twelve percent of the world's
population just before the pandemic, So we've made amazing progress.
(34:06):
In fact, some people almost thought that the end of
extreme poverty was going so well it was almost inevitable.
But then obviously the pandemic struck, then the war in Ukraine,
which impacts grain and food food prices, and then also
the recession, which impacts the poor the most. Right, so
now is not the time to keep our eyes off
the price. At precisely the moment when the world needs
(34:28):
to focus most on the eradication of extreme poverty, many
people have to look inward right now because they're like, oh,
it's a terrible economy, right and so people are like, Okay,
do I need to focus on my well being? But
now is not the time to take our eyes off
the prize. The world was making great progress. It can
make great progress again. We need political leadership that is courageous.
(34:50):
We also need we also need the private sector, and
I'm glad that you know you're a champion of this
to realize they have a huge role to play. You know,
when when I was at the World Economic Forum a
few like last month, I saw that there were great
partners like Accenture, like City, like Cisco, that we're willing
(35:11):
to use their brands as forces for good and show
how they could create change it was super inspiring, and
so I think that that What I find is that
when crisis strikes, it's if the private sector leads first,
government often follows fast. It. Actually I've seen it. I
saw it during the COVID pandemic. I saw it again
(35:33):
with the war in Ukraine. It's possible for the private
sector to be a leader as a force for good.
And so I would encourage every executive who's listening to
this to use your platform as a force for good.
You have so much power to then persuade government to
also do the right thing. I want to go back
to impact, how ordinary citizens can make an impact by
(35:57):
pledging to do something. Do you record all the time
when ordinary citizens have taken an action which has led
to a result that's actually really surprised you something you
work you once show was going to work. Yeah, I
get surprised all the time. So back in twenty eighteen
(36:19):
twenty nineteen, when we worked Quig Grew Mandela, one of
our our chief vision officer at Global Citizen, he had
this dream of working with his family to celebrate his grandfather,
Nelson Mandela's hundredth anniversary, and so we brought Global Citizen
to South Africa and Beyonce and Jay Z and Coldplay
(36:42):
and Edge Shearan and Pharrell and Oprah Winfrey and Dave
Chappelle and Trevor Noer and extraordinary group of people all
decided they wanted to be part of this Naomi Campbell.
It was really amazing and the momentum was building, and
we decided we wanted to partner with local activists rather
than just presume that we knew what to bring as
(37:03):
a policy agenda. So we met with a whole bunch
of local activists and there was this extraordinary, amazing activists
from across Johannesburg and they were running this campaign called
It's Bloody Time. It was focused on period poverty across
South Africa. And they came to us and they said,
you know, we were gaining good momentum, but we need
(37:23):
the scale of your platform, and we're like, okay, great,
let's partner. And so we worked on this campaign and
we got global citizens to start making phone calls to
try to earn tickets to this event in December, and
the first goal was to try to eliminate the tax
on menstrual hygiene products. And they made our global citizens
made so many phone calls to Pretoria that the government
(37:44):
had to take all the phones off the hook because
they couldn't keep up with the number of inbound phone calls.
So it was fantastic and so we, together with those
local activists, successfully got the tax on pads and napkin
and menstr hygiene products eliminated it. But that wasn't enough,
you know. We actually had to Seymour follow through, and
(38:05):
so we kept the pressure specifically on President Ramaposa and
he was coming to Global Citizen and I'll never forget
all the all the great activists were in the arena
in Johannesburg and the President looked at me and he
spoke about how he'd heard about its Bloody Time campaign
(38:26):
and he put out he brought out his iPad as
he was preparing his speech and he wrote in the
column one hundred and twenty nine million dollars of menstrual
hygiene products. He just wrote that then and there because
he was so moved by the momentum, and that's what
enabled him to then follow through and make sure a
million girls across South Africa in public schools had access
to anstrual hygiene products. So we often find right until
(38:49):
the very last second when a world leader is willing
to take the stage, that there, you know, and we
make sure we hold their feet to the fire to
make sure they follow through on those commitments. And we
have the best journalistic partners, like you know, the editor
in chief of Forbes is on our board, Randal Lane.
He helps us old world leaders accountable. We love to
partner with journalists to make sure those world leaders actually
(39:13):
follow through and what they're going to say. But it's
powerful stuff when you see how up until that very
last moment, ahead of state, with the discretion to make
a difference, does so. That's fantastic. And period poverty is
such a real issue in the developing world. I mean,
to see tangible change like that isn't incredible. I am
constantly struck by the fact that you were this young
(39:35):
Australian kid who saw who experienced a knight in Islam
and Manila, but that changed the course of your life.
I'm the mom of a teenage boy. I see teenage
kids a lot. I'm sure many of them have seen poverty.
I don't know how many of them are going to
(39:55):
sort of go down the path that you've chosen. I
really want to under stand. Why do you think that
affected you so much? Oh, it's funny, like I I
this is a bit of a personal answer that I
don't usually talk about. But I probably wasn't as aware
at the time as I am now about the factors
that were going on in my life at them at
(40:16):
that time. You know, like my parents were going through
a divorce, my my home life wasn't It wasn't massively stable.
And so I think now that I look back on it,
in some ways the opportunity to serve others became a
catharsis for me. I didn't realize it at the time,
(40:40):
but but I was able to think, Okay, the world
has so much greater needs than all the challenges that
I'm going through. Their minuscule by comparison, right and so
and so it gave me this intense focus on on
the issues of justice that I knew in my heart
(41:02):
had always driven me. You know, I grew up believing,
you know that the world should be more just, should
be more compassionate, should be more kind to others. They
were values that were instilled in me in a young age.
But I when I saw firsthand the reality of it,
(41:23):
and I've got to admit in those early days, I
had no idea what path that would take. You know.
I thought at one stage I wanted to be the
CEO of Well Visioned in Australia, and because I looked
up to the CEO at the time, and then I
was really fortunate in that two of Australia's former Prime ministers,
Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, both kindly agreed to mentor me.
(41:47):
So I saw the power of political change. But it
really wasn't until probably a seminal moment when I was
twenty one and I was studying in university in the
g twenty was coming through Melbourne and me and my
mate Dan Adams had this idea to run a small concert.
That one day exploded when Bono and Pearl Jam agreed
(42:09):
to perform at it, and we managed to convince the
Australian government to double foreign aid off the back of
this campaign. It wasn't until that moment that I, I
guess my my true North took greater shape. It took
it took time, It took a lot of education and
un education. You know, I had to relearn and learn
(42:30):
all over again. But I think those factors at home
coupled with the people who influenced my life came together
in the way it did, probably a way of healing
for yourself as well, I'd say so. So one of
(42:52):
your mentors, Kevin Rod, who's been on this podcast. Oh yes,
And my last question is this podcast is called out
of Office. What's your favorite thing to do when you're
not at the office. By far, my great favorite thing,
it's surfing. I absolutely love surfing. And I you know,
(43:14):
people would say, well, of course he does his Australian
but no, I did not surf growing up. It wasn't
until the last five years where I really took it
up and I've absolutely fallen in love with it because
when you're in the water and a huge wave is
coming towards you, is it. Last week I actually went
surfing and I got totally humbled because this wave absolutely
(43:36):
crushed me and I I was terrified. But then the
next day I went out and I had the best
surf of my life where I caught the longest wave
I ever had, and I was like, it's those you
see the power of nature, but you see also just
the beauty of nature. And so for me, nothing like surfing,
like I'll I could, if I could somehow work as
(43:58):
hard as I need to, and so if I would
do that every day, but I don't think that's too impossible.
It's forever going to be attention. Well one day, maybe
one day when when you've eradicated extreme poverty, you can
go out and self every exactly exactly. Thank you so
much for speaking to me and out of office you.
(44:18):
Thank you, Melica. It's such a pleasure to speak with
you today. Thank you. That was Hugh Evans, co founder
and CEO of Global Citizen. I hope you enjoyed our chat.
I know that I enjoyed every minute of it. This
episode was produced by Ya Joe's son and Young Young.
I'm Alika Kapoor. As always, thank you for listening.
Hi, and welcome to Out of Office. I'm your host,
Malika Kupoor my guest today. Hugh Evans is a co
founder and CEO of Global Citizen. You probably no Global
Citizen from its mega concerts, which feature the likes of
Chris Martin, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Preanca Chopra Jonas. All
this star power serves one purpose to bring awareness to
(00:27):
Global citizens goal, which is to eradicate extreme poverty. Many
would say that's pretty ambitious, and Hugh agrees. But since
poverty is man made, he says, we are the ones
who can overcome it. It doesn't require charity, it needs
urgent action. Global Citizen calls on people around the world
to do something. Send a letter to a president, tweet
(00:51):
at a prime minister, canvas campaign, lobby people in positions
of power to make systemic changes at alleviate poverty in
their pockets of the world. Global Citizen has millions of
members and support from an incredible list of a plus
celebrities that include politicians, philanthropists, CEOs, movie stars, and pop stars.
(01:11):
I've met Hugh a few times over the past few years,
and I've always been struck by his conviction that this
is the way to alleviate extreme poverty. And I get
the feeling he's not going to give up on that
goal ever, because doing that with break a vow he
made to his fourteen year old self when he spent
a night in a Manilla slum as part of a
school trip. There were cockroaches, there was garbage, the place
(01:35):
smelt bad, but the boy next to him, who lived
in that slum slept soundly. Melbourne Borne, Hugh realized the
only reason that boy slept there every night and he
didn't was the lottery of fate. That's when Hugh decided
this is what he was going to spend his life doing,
eradicating extreme poverty. He has Hugh Evans on Out of Office.
(02:01):
You're welcome to Out of Office. Thank you so much
for having me today. You've said your life's goal is
to eradicate extreme poverty around the world. You've had celebrities
everyone from Lady Gaga to Chris Martin join you in
your mission, and of course we'll talk about their role
in a few minutes. But first I want to go
back in time. I want to go back and meet
(02:23):
fourteen year old Hugh who spent the night in a
Manila slam which really set you down this path you're on.
What was it like, What did you see, what did
you smell? What did you hear? Well, what happened was
I was in my first year of high school. I
(02:43):
was twelve thirteen years old, and a lady from a
charity came and spoke at our school about raising money
for communities in the developing world. And when you're that age,
when well, when I was that age, I was quite
an eager young kid and I put up my hand
and I said, Okay, I want to see a buck
and raise some money. And I was so enthusiastic. I
knocked on every single door in the neighborhood. I asked
(03:04):
everyone I possibly could, and I ended up raising the
most amount of money of any kid in Australia. And
so the charity sent me to the Philippines to learn
more about issues of global development. And there was one
night in the Philippines that changed my life forever. In
a slum called Smoky Mountain, It's a slum built on
(03:25):
top of a rubbish dump in the center of Manila,
and this whole community revolves around scavenging. So the kids
every single day run after the garbage trucks try to
get bits of scrap metal, piece of food and things
that they can recycle. And that night I was placed
in the care of a kid in my own age.
His name is Sunny Boy. We were both fourteen at
the time, but where I'd come from, just middle class
(03:49):
Melbourne in Australia. He had tattoos on his forearm at
the age of fourteen because he was about to become
his gang leader, and that was his form of initiation.
And that night he took me to his house and
we cooked this meal together with some food that I
brought with me. But when it came time to go
to sleep, I'll never forget he just cleared away the
pots and pans on the ground and we lay down,
(04:10):
myself and Sunny Boy in the rest of his family,
seven of us in this long line, and we just
lay there that night. I'll never forget it, with the
smell of rubbish all around uscars we're on a garbage
dump and cockroaches crawling around us. And I didn't sleep
that night, but I lay awake thinking to myself, you know,
it really is pure chance that I was born where
(04:33):
I was born, and he was born where he was born.
As Warren Buffett calls it, it's the Ovarian lottery. We
don't deserve our lottery in life. And so I decided
that night that I was going to commit my life
to seeing what could be done to eradicate extreme poverty
within our lifetime. And that's been my lifet journey ever since.
(04:53):
Do you know where Sunny Boy is now? I do,
because he actually messages me every day now on Facebook Messenger.
So so, so what happened was I lost touch with
him because he gave it was nineteen ninety eight, ninety seven.
I was there and he gave me his number on
(05:16):
a piece of paper, and my mum put my jeans
through the washing and I lost the piece of paper,
and so I actually assumed I was never going to
be able to be in touch with him ever again.
And then twenty years later I was invited to do
a TED talk and some great group of great couple
from the Netherlands who actually lived in the Philippines. Now
(05:37):
they saw my Ted talk and they said, we think
we know whose Sunny Boy is. And I honestly couldn't
believe it. And so I a year later it was
invited to fly back to Philippines properly for the first
time in twenty years, and sure enough I was reunited
with him, and I mean I was in tears. He
was crying, like it was kind of unbelievable. Like the
(05:59):
strange thing was that he said that I had had
an impact in his life as well, which was meant.
I thought I was just another person that he would
never remember. But but we both remembered each other as vividly.
It was yes as yesterday, and so we were The
first hour was just we were in tears of joy
and and and then you know, and then and then
(06:22):
it became practical, you know, I was wanted to find
out how he's doing. What had happened is that the
Manila authorities decided the land that Smoky Mountain was built on,
because it was near the water, was actually very valuable land,
so they did they didn't want it to be used
for a scavenging anymore, and they tried to relocate Sunny
(06:43):
Boy and his family out of that community. So I
set up a small fund to start to help all
of his kids to go to school, as well as
for him to buy a rickshaw, so we had a
source of income and for him and his wife, and lease,
we set up a shop front in front of their
(07:03):
homes so they could start to have their own form
of commerce. Because I've always believed that the best way
to alleviate poverty is through giving people an opportunity to
lift themselves out of extreme poverty. And and so we
wanted to do something that was sustainable. And you know,
he sends me the most beautiful messages. He's like, he's
just the most lovely guy. And I mean, he but
(07:26):
you know, I got to tell you that life isn't
easy just because just because he has the support. You know,
like during COVID, like everyone else, he wasn't able to
work because because you know, the Manila Authority, the authorities
decided that rickshaw drivers could only drive every odor even day,
depending on their license plate. And so it you know,
(07:50):
you see how things that affect you and I have
a much greater profound impact on those living extreme poverty
because they're living on the edge of existence already. So
if you take away that livelihood, you take away their school,
you take away their food security, you take away in
the access to healthcare, and it has a snowball effect.
And that's the challenge of extreme poverty, you know, helping
(08:14):
people graduate out of living on less than one dollar
ninety per day to having their own job and then
ultimately growing from a small enterprise into a larger enterprise
so they can actually support their family and their community.
How do you define extreme poverty? What's the difference between
poverty and extreme poverty? Well, you know, poverty as a
(08:37):
notion is relative, right, so you know, someone could be
poorer than someone else, but both of them could be
relatively affluent. So it's not actually helpful to talk about
it in terms of poverty. I find I always focus on,
you know, the weld banked definition of those living on
less than US one dollar ninety per day. But it's
(08:57):
much better to think about it in terms of the
in the inputs that are needed to alleviate poverty, which
is obviously food security, water and sanitation, healthcare. We're not
just talking about polio, We're talking about HIV, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis,
all the leading killers of kids under the age of five.
(09:17):
We're talking about water and sanitation, and we're talking about
the empowerment of girls and women. And increasingly the world
is seeing the nexus between climate change and extreme poverty.
Because ultimately, you know, when a huge hurricane comes through
a poor community or a natural disasters who've just seen
in Turkey, it has a disproportionate effect on the poor
(09:41):
because they don't have the infrastructure to begin with, and
so or safe infrastructure to begin with. And so that's
where you can wipe and tire GDP points off. The
economy is simply through natural disasters, and why we need
to understand the nexus between climate change and extreme poverty.
So you had this experience in Manila. You went back
(10:03):
to Australia, but it seems like you were on this
journey from from that day on, right, and you went
and spent a year in India. I didn't know you
went to Woodstock in Missouri. I did. Yeah, it was
I have a lot of friends who went there. You do.
That's great, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's Missouri is beautiful, right,
(10:24):
the hill stations of India, it is. It is. So yeah.
I came back and I came back at the end
of that time in the Philippines and I said to
my mum, you know, this is my life's journey now,
and she was a bit of gas. You didn't know
how to take that, and I said, that's exactly where
(10:45):
I was going to go with this question, which is
you're this regular kid in Melbourne, right, and then you
start making these really unconventional choices. You go to India.
Then after that you spent your gap year in Africa.
How did your family react? Well, well, not not so well,
to be honest, My mom my mum hated the idea.
I remember I said to her, I'm going to go
(11:06):
and live for a year in India and she said,
you know, there's no there's no way that's going to happen.
I said, well, I'll if I can do you a deal,
if I can apply for a scholarship to go to
Woodstock School and the Himalayas so that it doesn't cost
Because you know, our family wasn't super well off. We
were just middle class from Melbourne and so m so
we obviously couldn't afford for me to go. And so
(11:28):
I said, if I can get a full scholarship, will
you let me go? And she said, okay, deal, And
so I worked as hard as I possibly could and
got this scholarship and and I'll never forget the day
I jumped on the airplane from Melbourne through Singapore onto Delhi,
about to catch the Shatabdi Express up up to the Himalayas.
(11:50):
And I remember I jumped on the airplane. I was
a fifteen year old kid. I was by myself, and
I sat next to this big businessman and I remember
I looked him up in the eyes and I completely
burst into tears. I was so scared because I realized
what had happened to me. I was like, okay, I
can't I can't speak to my parents anymore for another year.
So and it was before the days of like data
(12:12):
service or proper cell phones, so that like and there
was no reception in the Himalayas, right and so and
so so like Mum would hate it, like she would
try to call me and it wouldn't go through ever.
And you know, and I remember the day I arrived
into into Woodstock and a couple of crazy things happened,
(12:35):
you know, both really formative things for me, but in
both a good way in a bad way, I guess. Um. Firstly,
I arrived in my bed that I was going to
be sleeping on had a spider infestation. And so I
remember I remember the Dawnmaster whacking hundreds of spiders under
my bed and then just put it back and said, okay,
(12:55):
go to bed now. And then and then the second
thing that happened was I had my first introduction to
communal bathrooms because like I grew up in like private Australia.
And then and like first day in the bathroom, and
all of a sudden, like I'm like, okay, I lost
my sense of self consciousness. And but also something really
(13:17):
tragic happened. Like two weeks after I arrived. I was
just playing up at the school with my friend John.
You know, were both fifteen year old kids, students, just playing,
and all of a sudden, a car fell over the
cud fell over the cliff face. And you know, there's
no ambulance service in that region, right, and so me
and my friend John ran down and tried to act
(13:41):
as the first responders to it. Just tragic, tragic, tragic
scene where a man had was wedged between the fork
of a tree hanging over the cliff. And you know,
we we with a few others. I ran up and
got a stretcher from the school. We placed him in
(14:01):
the back of a car and try and John jumped
in the back to try to give him mouth to
mouth resuscitation, but the man, you know, tragically passed away
an hour later. And I that night, I just, I mean,
call me naive, and maybe I was, but like I
just it hit me that night how fragile life is.
(14:23):
And I was like, okay, this is where I live now,
this is a different you know. It just it shifted
my shifted my gears entirely, Like I think, I went
to India very much as a self conscious fifteen year
old student and came back with the realization that in
those days, you know, two thirds of people in India
(14:44):
were homeless or slum dwellers. That's it was thirty nine
times Australia's population homeless or slum dwellers. So it hit
me that the scale of the challenge couldn't be solved
through traditional charity. Like I in some ways became a
little more my eyes were more widely open to the
limitations of traditional charity. It hit me that no amount
(15:05):
of black tie gala dinners or nice fundraisers were ever
going to solve a three point five trillion dollar challenged,
and so I had to think about it differently. And
it was that year in India that changed my perspective
on things. And you have chosen a rather non traditional way.
And your way is, like you said, you don't get
(15:26):
people to donate money, but you get people to take action.
Tell us a little bit about this model. How does
it work well. Our model was inspired by one of
the final speeches that Nelson Mandela gave back in two
thousand and five in Trafalgar Square when he helped launch
the Make Poverty History campaign, and he said at the time,
(15:49):
he said that overcoming poverty it's not a gesture of charity,
but it's an act of justice. He then said, like
slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural, it's man aiding
can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
And I love though that speech because in that speech
lies two hugely important truths. Firstly that extreme poverty is
(16:12):
the systemic issue, not a aritable challenge, and secondly that
it can be overcome by action taking, as he said.
And so what we decide to do was to leverage
the power of citizen action taking at scale. We created
an app, the Global Citizen App, where citizens would download
it and call on world leaders. In Unison. We have
(16:34):
millions of members, so let's say we're all calling on
the same world leader at once to make a multibillion
dollar pledge to that specific issue area. One great example
is a couple of years ago, we launched what we
call the Twitter Invasion of Norway with Stephen Colbert, and
we had so many global citizens call on Prime Minister
(16:54):
Ernest Solberg of Norway when she was in power to
be one of the first Scandinavian countries to support girls
education globally properly at scale. And I remember we launched
this campaign one night and I got a call from
the Chief of staff the next day saying, cancel all
the tweets. We can't see any tweets from the Norwegian
people because we're getting too many from global citizens and
(17:16):
in the middle of an election, we need to stop
the tweets. And they said, come to Oslo, and so
we we flew to Oslo. We sat down with the
Prime Minister and we said, would you champion global partnership
for education and she said okay, and she came on
global citizen stage and made a two hundred and fifty
million dollar commitment. And that's how the model works. We
(17:38):
show that it's much more effective to create systemic change
through actions, and it's through achieving that its scale. So
we now have eleven and a half million members around
the world, and all of those members take action, and
music is a very important platform for you as well.
And very often so when people make these actions, then
(18:01):
they earn a reward right and that's often a past
to one of a global citizen experience. For example, one
of your ultra famous music concerts that you hold around
the world. And we'll talk about the concerts in a minute.
But why why music? Well, music has always been the
anthem of movements throughout all of social history. So if
(18:22):
you think about a song like Amazing Grace that inspired
the late William Wilberforce Um and you know, it's a
it's a story of redemption. A person that that was
a slave trader decided that he had um. You know,
he says that saved a wrench like me. You know,
he called himself a wrench for everything that he had
(18:43):
done to hurt humanity. Or if you think about, you know,
the anti apartheid movement and the March on Pretoria, it
was it was the anthem. You know, often the Zulu
or Cossa anthems at the time that inspired the solidarity movement,
and I believe that the same is true right now.
(19:03):
You know, music can be that great catalyzer. In the
way that we've used it a Global Citizen is that
we've partnered with the world's biggest musicians to provide scalable
incentives for citizens to take action so they can come
to the Global Citizen Festival for free. We said, we
don't want your money, we want you to take action.
We want action to be your currency. So the more
(19:26):
actions you take, the greater the likelihood that you'll be
able to come to the Global Citizen Festival. But through
our partnership with Live Nation and Ticketmaster, you can now
earn rewards to every great artist show around the world.
And in fact, we're driving more actions through the Global
Citizen app than through any of our festivals. So while
our festivals are really high profile year round, citizens are
(19:49):
taking action every second of every day. And so that's
actually how you create sustainable change because movements can't come
and go. It's not like there's less urgent. See just
because an issue falls out of the headlines. We need
to create that sense of urgency and the only way
you can do that is using the power of technology
powered by the anthem of music year round. So since
(20:11):
your audience they aren't buying tickets to attend these music concerts,
which have the biggest names in the world, how do
you fund them? Well, we work with great philanthropists. So
for example, Bloomberg Philanthropies alongside the Bill and Melindigates Foundation
supported our global goal Unite for our Future campaign in
(20:33):
twenty and twenty when we were focused on the issue
of financing vaccine equity around the world during the pandemic.
We also work with ethical organizations and corporations that actually
want to make a difference in the world. So amazing
groups like Accenture or City Bank, or Cisco or Procter
(20:55):
and Gamble or Verizon or Delta Airlines who've partnered with us,
And the cool thing about the way they work with
Global Citizen is they say, you know what, we want
a partner with you to help reach the whole world
with this message of good which is for me. Is
really positive because it shows that Global Citizen doesn't partner
with sorry, doesn't doesn't compete with a normal NGO. It's
(21:19):
not like we're going out and trying to take the
money that you know someone would want to give to
a n a set for Save the Children. Right, we
don't ask consumers for their dollars, but instead we're going
to brands and saying, could you give us marketing support
and marketing dollars that you might otherwise allocate to, say
(21:40):
a sporting event, because wouldn't it be much better than
just funding a sporting event, actually spun something that can
actually change the world. And these brands do and they go, okay, cool,
we love sports, so we'll still allocate some money for
sport over here, but we'll also allocate money so that
we can actually support Global Citizen to have a huge impact.
And that's why they're able to support us over the
(22:02):
long haul, which is actually a far better model because
it means that we're not running from pillar to post
just trying to fundraise all the time. We're actually able
to be strategic, and so when an issue hits the
world like the pandemic did, or like the war in
Ukraine did, Global Citizen is equipped to respond because we
have a team at the ready who's able to rapidly
(22:24):
respond to the world's greatest challenges. And we're finding that
these brands are stepping up in ways that you wouldn't
even imagine, whether it's their commitment to the Race to zero,
to cutting their own carbon emissions, or working with us
as we have with Procter and Gamble on period of
poverty around the world, or genuinely trying to close the
digital dividers. We've seen with Cisco and Verizon. You know,
(22:46):
we've seen how brands are like, Okay, we want to
integrate not just our purpose work, but actually integrate that
into our business model. And so that's been a really
exciting evolution that we're seeing. You have a new experience
coming up and approv tell us about that. Well, this
is something that we've been working on for a long time,
and I know the dream here and it's called Global
(23:11):
Citizen Now is We wanted to create a moment to
bring together the best leaders in activism and the NGO world,
the best leaders in the corporate world, the best leaders
in the political world, and the best leaders in the
artist world, all under one roof. But instead of it
becoming a talk fest like so many of those conferences are,
(23:34):
we decided that our whole mantra would be about turning
ideas into impact and driving urgent change to end Extreme
Poverty Now. So on April twenty seven to twenty eighth,
we're hosting Global Citizen Now. It's going to be our
two days summit in New York City. It's the second
year we're hosting it. Last year we were thrilled that
incredible activists like for Ell Williams and Glorious Dynham and
(23:57):
President bonder Line and Chuck Robbins of Cisco all came
along to help us kick it off. And this year,
you know where couldn't be happier that you know, President
bonder Line is coming back, Hugh Jackman and Chris Martin
are going to be there. Um you know Prime Minister
Mia Motley of Barbados, who's become an amazing champion for
what's called the Bridgetown Agenda of Climate financing, as well
(24:20):
as you know Nana Cooper Addu, the President of Ghana,
and an extraordinary group of private sector leaders like Hahns Vesberg,
the chairman and CEO Verizon near By Day who's the
co CEO of Bridgewater and Associates, fran Katsutas, who's the
chief people officer at Cisco. You know, we're bringing together
this extraordinary group of of amazing leaders. But everything is
(24:43):
focused on action taking and everything is focused on impact.
So we're not going to host a single panel unless
there's an action to be taken out of it. When
you go to these celebrities, Chris Martin, I know, has
been a big part of your campaign from pretty much
the start great from the start of Global Citizen. What's
(25:03):
your bitch? What do you say to them? How do
you manage to get every alister to join you? For us,
it's all about can we measure impact? Right? You know,
because life's too short, there's no point us running. I
don't actually believe in the concept of awareness raising. I
think people already know that extreme poverty exists, They just
(25:25):
need to know how to change it. Right. People already
know that climate change is happening, they just need to
know how to change it. So if we can't bring
a solution to our artist partners, then we're not a
good partner to them. So every time we do a briefing,
we sit down with Chris Martin, or with Hugh Jackman,
or with Beyonce or princachuper Jonas, we bring to that
(25:47):
conversation a set of policy outcomes that we are committed
to achieving a campaign timeline in which we're going to
achieve it, and a set of milestones along the way,
and so they can go, okay, am I truly enlisted
in this like So, for example, early on in the pandemic,
when Chris Martin started jamming in his house around the
(26:08):
Together at Home concert, we said, okay, we have to
raise money to support PPE because at that stage, frontline
community healthcare workers desperately needed funding just for basic things
like masks and face shields and so on, and gloves
and so on and so forth. And so when Lady
Gaga came to us and we had that conversation with
(26:28):
her and doctor Ted Ross, the head of the who
around turning this into one world Together at Home, we said, okay,
let's sit down and let's host round tables and get
every corporation to commit one by one, and we got
Apple's CEO committed ten million dollars on the spot, you know,
like it was extraordinary generosity, And we got one hundred
(26:49):
and twenty seven point nine million dollars raised in just
a few days and broke two world records in the
Guinness World Records because of the focus on outcomes. And
then we have an impact measurement team whose entire job
it is to track the follow through of those commitments
to make sure that those dollars and those supplies in
(27:10):
this case it was ppe ends up in the hands
of those who need it most. And so that's our model.
We bring to an artist a real solution, and we
track that solution, and we say, how can we make
this scalable? I just fully believe with all my heart
that if we just host more gala dinners, as nice
(27:30):
as they are, we'll be hosting gala dinners till all
of eternity and will have not made a dent in
extreme poverty. Let's flip the model and let's see how
advocacy can leverage public resource tied with private resource at scale.
Because we need trillions of dollars to end extreme poverty.
It's not going to be solved just through the good
(27:54):
feelings that you and I might get through building a
single water well here or a school there, and by
the way, that's important and those that infrastructure needs to exist.
But we must finance it. What I'm trying to get as,
we must finance it at scale. We can't be financing
it through just short term transactions. You know, all the
(28:15):
actions people take, they're they're directed towards the un sustainable
development goals, whether it's education or gender discrimination, health, these
these important issues. What would have happened if you just
picked one issue of just why not just pick one Education?
We focus obviously on the the the macro challenge of
(28:38):
any in extreme poverty. The key thing to realize is
that these issues are deeply interconnected and if you were
to focus just on one issue, that same issue will
be very quickly undermined by another. Let me give you
an example. So take Barbados, a low to middle income
country that is you know now has a great democratically
(28:59):
elect leader in Prime Minister Motley, who's doing so much
to try to champion their economy. And let's say you
and I, to your logic, want to focus just on
the issue of job creation for example. Okay, so that
was our issue. We went job creation, We're going to support,
so we developed all the inputs, we supported the Farmers
(29:20):
Association in Barbados, so on and so forth. Then all
of a sudden, a hurricane comes through and it wipes
out all of the infrastructure of Barbados for months and
is completely destroyed because you and I had taken our
eye off the prize and we hadn't really focused on
the interconnected of these issues. We're just focused on one issue.
All of a sudden, those people are going to be
(29:41):
out of work for months, they're going to be complaining
of months, and they'll be pushed straight back into extreme poverty.
So single issue advocacy, while important, is incomplete. The second
thing I'd say is that it also ignores how global
funding cycles work. Because every five years the world raises
money need to fight HIV, AIDS, malarum tuberculosis for the
(30:02):
Global Fund or then gave the Vaccine Alliance or the
IF and replenishment, sorry, the either replenishment of the World Bank.
So if we just focused on one issue in the
intervening four years, are we're just going to let people
suffer and just twiddle our thumbs. I don't think so.
I think that's where we actually need to understand how
global funding cycles work and understand how one, if you
(30:25):
don't address these issues in an interconnected fashion, they will
undermine each other. And two we actually have the opportunity
to find those moments, those rare political moments where the
right confluence of good leadership comes together with good public
policy to do the right thing. Perfect example is this
year in June when President mccron, alongside Prime Minister Motley
(30:48):
and several other world leaders have agreed to host the
Summit on Climate Financing. This isn't the year where we're
raising money for the Global Fund, This isn't the year
were of raising money for GAVE. It's the moment where
we can focus on two big things, both climate financing
and the sixteen point five billion dollar financing gap under
the Paris Climate Change a Chord. But secondly, we can
(31:08):
also focus on the issue of equitable access to financing
through the developing world more broadly, because for too long
the World Bank has been missing in action and they're
two trillion dollars in reserve assets, have been sitting there
doing nothing, and the balance sheet has not been stretched
because you've had a leader under Malpass, who fortunately is
now resigned, who wasn't really committed to global development. And
(31:30):
so this is where my point is, you can't just
let people suffer. You have to choose those moments where
you can have real breakthroughs. And every year provides a
new moment for a breakthrough. Looking back. What are you
proudest of in Global citizens journey so far? I'm proudest
of our team, you know, like when I like, we
(31:53):
still have the like the small team that started in
the early days, you know, like our co founder Mayor
Can Simon and Quaku and and Liza and Caroline and
you know, our broader team. You know, everyone who's involved
has been involved for like, you know, almost more than
ten years, you know, like they've really dedicated their their
(32:16):
their lives to it. Like and you know, our founding chairperson, Beater,
he you know, he was involved for the first eleven
years and he's still involved on the purpose because because
it's like, even though he retired as chairman, he wanted
to stay involved. So I think, like what I find
in our team, we always have this this this internal
(32:38):
dialogue of saying, are we truly putting the Mitchen first?
And if we ever lose sight of that, then woe
was asked. You know, we've got to always keep that
as our true north UM. And it can be hard
because you know, when you grow as an organization UM,
and you know, you take on new challenges and and
lots of more staff, you know, it can be easy
to focus on the process rather than the outcome. I
(33:00):
remember our founding chairman first said to me, you never
ever lose sight of the track that you're trying to
build a movement, not an institution. There's tons of institutions
that are fat and bloated and do nothing. Your goal
is to build an agile movement that never loses its
focus on the mission. And so I believe in fifteen
(33:21):
years time, when we've eradicated extreme poverty, global citizen should
not need to exist anymore. We can have one final
concert as a celebration in Central Park, but then we
should close outdoors because because that's got to be our
true north, that's got to be our modus operandi, that's
got to be the way in which we drive ourselves.
Are we any closer to ending global poverty than we
(33:43):
were when you first launched? So there's good news and
bad news. The good news is when I was born
in nineteen eighty three, fifty two percent of the planet
lived in extreme poverty, and over the last thirty years
that actually reduced to only twelve percent of the world's
population just before the pandemic, So we've made amazing progress.
(34:06):
In fact, some people almost thought that the end of
extreme poverty was going so well it was almost inevitable.
But then obviously the pandemic struck, then the war in Ukraine,
which impacts grain and food food prices, and then also
the recession, which impacts the poor the most. Right, so
now is not the time to keep our eyes off
the price. At precisely the moment when the world needs
(34:28):
to focus most on the eradication of extreme poverty, many
people have to look inward right now because they're like, oh,
it's a terrible economy, right and so people are like, Okay,
do I need to focus on my well being? But
now is not the time to take our eyes off
the prize. The world was making great progress. It can
make great progress again. We need political leadership that is courageous.
(34:50):
We also need we also need the private sector, and
I'm glad that you know you're a champion of this
to realize they have a huge role to play. You know,
when when I was at the World Economic Forum a
few like last month, I saw that there were great
partners like Accenture, like City, like Cisco, that we're willing
(35:11):
to use their brands as forces for good and show
how they could create change it was super inspiring, and
so I think that that What I find is that
when crisis strikes, it's if the private sector leads first,
government often follows fast. It. Actually I've seen it. I
saw it during the COVID pandemic. I saw it again
(35:33):
with the war in Ukraine. It's possible for the private
sector to be a leader as a force for good.
And so I would encourage every executive who's listening to
this to use your platform as a force for good.
You have so much power to then persuade government to
also do the right thing. I want to go back
to impact, how ordinary citizens can make an impact by
(35:57):
pledging to do something. Do you record all the time
when ordinary citizens have taken an action which has led
to a result that's actually really surprised you something you
work you once show was going to work. Yeah, I
get surprised all the time. So back in twenty eighteen
(36:19):
twenty nineteen, when we worked Quig Grew Mandela, one of
our our chief vision officer at Global Citizen, he had
this dream of working with his family to celebrate his grandfather,
Nelson Mandela's hundredth anniversary, and so we brought Global Citizen
to South Africa and Beyonce and Jay Z and Coldplay
(36:42):
and Edge Shearan and Pharrell and Oprah Winfrey and Dave
Chappelle and Trevor Noer and extraordinary group of people all
decided they wanted to be part of this Naomi Campbell.
It was really amazing and the momentum was building, and
we decided we wanted to partner with local activists rather
than just presume that we knew what to bring as
(37:03):
a policy agenda. So we met with a whole bunch
of local activists and there was this extraordinary, amazing activists
from across Johannesburg and they were running this campaign called
It's Bloody Time. It was focused on period poverty across
South Africa. And they came to us and they said,
you know, we were gaining good momentum, but we need
(37:23):
the scale of your platform, and we're like, okay, great,
let's partner. And so we worked on this campaign and
we got global citizens to start making phone calls to
try to earn tickets to this event in December, and
the first goal was to try to eliminate the tax
on menstrual hygiene products. And they made our global citizens
made so many phone calls to Pretoria that the government
(37:44):
had to take all the phones off the hook because
they couldn't keep up with the number of inbound phone calls.
So it was fantastic and so we, together with those
local activists, successfully got the tax on pads and napkin
and menstr hygiene products eliminated it. But that wasn't enough,
you know. We actually had to Seymour follow through, and
(38:05):
so we kept the pressure specifically on President Ramaposa and
he was coming to Global Citizen and I'll never forget
all the all the great activists were in the arena
in Johannesburg and the President looked at me and he
spoke about how he'd heard about its Bloody Time campaign
(38:26):
and he put out he brought out his iPad as
he was preparing his speech and he wrote in the
column one hundred and twenty nine million dollars of menstrual
hygiene products. He just wrote that then and there because
he was so moved by the momentum, and that's what
enabled him to then follow through and make sure a
million girls across South Africa in public schools had access
to anstrual hygiene products. So we often find right until
(38:49):
the very last second when a world leader is willing
to take the stage, that there, you know, and we
make sure we hold their feet to the fire to
make sure they follow through on those commitments. And we
have the best journalistic partners, like you know, the editor
in chief of Forbes is on our board, Randal Lane.
He helps us old world leaders accountable. We love to
partner with journalists to make sure those world leaders actually
(39:13):
follow through and what they're going to say. But it's
powerful stuff when you see how up until that very
last moment, ahead of state, with the discretion to make
a difference, does so. That's fantastic. And period poverty is
such a real issue in the developing world. I mean,
to see tangible change like that isn't incredible. I am
constantly struck by the fact that you were this young
(39:35):
Australian kid who saw who experienced a knight in Islam
and Manila, but that changed the course of your life.
I'm the mom of a teenage boy. I see teenage
kids a lot. I'm sure many of them have seen poverty.
I don't know how many of them are going to
(39:55):
sort of go down the path that you've chosen. I
really want to under stand. Why do you think that
affected you so much? Oh, it's funny, like I I
this is a bit of a personal answer that I
don't usually talk about. But I probably wasn't as aware
at the time as I am now about the factors
that were going on in my life at them at
(40:16):
that time. You know, like my parents were going through
a divorce, my my home life wasn't It wasn't massively stable.
And so I think now that I look back on it,
in some ways the opportunity to serve others became a
catharsis for me. I didn't realize it at the time,
(40:40):
but but I was able to think, Okay, the world
has so much greater needs than all the challenges that
I'm going through. Their minuscule by comparison, right and so
and so it gave me this intense focus on on
the issues of justice that I knew in my heart
(41:02):
had always driven me. You know, I grew up believing,
you know that the world should be more just, should
be more compassionate, should be more kind to others. They
were values that were instilled in me in a young age.
But I when I saw firsthand the reality of it,
(41:23):
and I've got to admit in those early days, I
had no idea what path that would take. You know.
I thought at one stage I wanted to be the
CEO of Well Visioned in Australia, and because I looked
up to the CEO at the time, and then I
was really fortunate in that two of Australia's former Prime ministers,
Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, both kindly agreed to mentor me.
(41:47):
So I saw the power of political change. But it
really wasn't until probably a seminal moment when I was
twenty one and I was studying in university in the
g twenty was coming through Melbourne and me and my
mate Dan Adams had this idea to run a small concert.
That one day exploded when Bono and Pearl Jam agreed
(42:09):
to perform at it, and we managed to convince the
Australian government to double foreign aid off the back of
this campaign. It wasn't until that moment that I, I
guess my my true North took greater shape. It took
it took time, It took a lot of education and
un education. You know, I had to relearn and learn
(42:30):
all over again. But I think those factors at home
coupled with the people who influenced my life came together
in the way it did, probably a way of healing
for yourself as well, I'd say so. So one of
(42:52):
your mentors, Kevin Rod, who's been on this podcast. Oh yes,
And my last question is this podcast is called out
of Office. What's your favorite thing to do when you're
not at the office. By far, my great favorite thing,
it's surfing. I absolutely love surfing. And I you know,
(43:14):
people would say, well, of course he does his Australian
but no, I did not surf growing up. It wasn't
until the last five years where I really took it
up and I've absolutely fallen in love with it because
when you're in the water and a huge wave is
coming towards you, is it. Last week I actually went
surfing and I got totally humbled because this wave absolutely
(43:36):
crushed me and I I was terrified. But then the
next day I went out and I had the best
surf of my life where I caught the longest wave
I ever had, and I was like, it's those you
see the power of nature, but you see also just
the beauty of nature. And so for me, nothing like surfing,
like I'll I could, if I could somehow work as
(43:58):
hard as I need to, and so if I would
do that every day, but I don't think that's too impossible.
It's forever going to be attention. Well one day, maybe
one day when when you've eradicated extreme poverty, you can
go out and self every exactly exactly. Thank you so
much for speaking to me and out of office you.
(44:18):
Thank you, Melica. It's such a pleasure to speak with
you today. Thank you. That was Hugh Evans, co founder
and CEO of Global Citizen. I hope you enjoyed our chat.
I know that I enjoyed every minute of it. This
episode was produced by Ya Joe's son and Young Young.
I'm Alika Kapoor. As always, thank you for listening.
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