Philanthropic singers Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder are booked to headline the 2013 Global Citizen Festival in New York City on Sept. 28.
Active participants to charity themselves, Keys and Wonder will voluntarily perform alongside John Mayer and Kings of Leon for the second annual Global Citizen Festival. The festival, held at Central Park, is an effort to end global poverty preferably by 2030. This annual event, which is with the UN General Assembly, aspires to put pressure on global leaders to address the needs of the poor.
“We’re asking world governments to commit and allocate at least 10% of their foreign aid budgets to basic education,” says organization CEO Hugh Evans. “Our principle objective is to enable people to take action.”
Tickets for the event are free but are asked to be earned from acts meant to help extreme poverty. Points can be earned toward free tickets through acts such as sending letters to political leaders or reposting information through social media.
In addition to streaming, live sites will be set up in cities around the world in public locations through big screens. Those cities will be announced in the coming weeks.
Performers at last year’s event included R&B artist John Legend along with other acts including Foo Fighters and Neil Young raising $1.3 billion in new fundraising commitments from nonprofit partners.
“We want to encourage people who got involved last year to continue to take their involvement to a whole new level,” says Evans.
This year’s event aims to have the list of musical performers represent the cause of ending poverty in the way they perform and the way that they are involved hoping to exceed last year’s success.
(Source: Huffington Post)