The Global Citizen Festival will again descend on the Great Lawn in Central Park, on Sept. 27, aiming to raise awareness and inspire action on the issue of extreme poverty worldwide. This year’s lineup will feature Jay Z, Carrie Underwood, No Doubt, Fun, Tiësto and the Roots.
As in the previous two years, the concert, which is likely to bring a capacity crowd of 60,000 to the lawn, is timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly meeting. The event is a push to help eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, through a combination of political action and earnest public involvement.
“This year we think we have an extraordinary opportunity to focus on three of the most pressing issues facing the global community,” said Hugh Evans, who as chief executive of the Global Poverty Project has been the driving force behind the festival. Those issues, he said, are education, sanitation and vaccination. His organization has paired each one with an ambitious but practical solution, like supporting the Water for the World Act, which awaits approval by the United States Congress.
One distinctive feature of the Global Citizen Festival is that most of its tickets are earned rather than bought: would-be concertgoers are directed to visit an official website, globalcitizen.org, to participate in awareness-building tasks, like watching an informational video or sending an approved tweet. One such task this year is signing a petition urging world leaders to direct $7.5 billion to the GAVI Alliance, formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, founded in 2000 with the objective of distributing vaccines to children in developing countries.
A more hands-on initiative called Days of Action, new this year, will designate specific dates on which to engage in volunteer efforts. The first of these will be July 18, which the United Nations recognizes as Mandela Day.
Since last year’s Global Citizen Festival, which featured Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys and others, the Global Poverty Project has expanded its reach through additional partnerships and programming. A series called Global Citizen Nights was inaugurated this spring, with more modestly scaled shows by the Fray (in Austin, Tex.) and Aloe Blacc (in Chicago). Last month the organization held the first Thank You Festival, featuring Tiësto and other electronic dance music (E.D.M.) artists, in Columbia, Md.
“After last year’s success,” Mr. Evans said, “Jay Z put up his hand and said, ‘I want to headline Year 3.’ We sat down with people from his Shawn Carter Foundation and found that there are so many alliances between what they’re trying to do and what we’re trying to do.” Along with his high stature in hip-hop, Jay Z brings a hometown connection and his own up-from-poverty tale: he grew up in the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, as he has recalled in more than a few of his verses. His presence also more or less ensures that “Empire State of Mind,” his 2009 hit with Alicia Keys, would be performed at the festival for the second year in a row.
“I think what we’ve found in the last year is that the movement has diversified,” Mr. Evans said. “It’s incredible to have the king of hip-hop on one end of the bill, coupled with the king of E.D.M. on the other end of the bill, and in the middle we’ve got one of the biggest country stars in America. There’s so much diversity on this bill, and that’s a very conscious decision.”