Monday, September 10, 2012

Global Citizen's GLOBAL FESTIVAL - Part I


Neil Young, Foo Fighers, The Black Keys...those are some pretty big names.  Seems like quite the feat. The "Global Festival" - a free ticketed music festival to help end extreme poverty.  Right. Up. My. Alley.  And free tickets!  Yes, that's right, free (if you want to go, learn how to snag some of your own here).

But, you may ask, if the tickets are free, they're clearly not raising any money.  How are they actually going to help end global poverty without any resources?  As  you might imagine, I am fascinated with this project.  So of course I dug in.

From what I can tell so far, it seems this is more of an awareness campaign than anything else - a drive to create "global citizens."  Would-be-concert goers are invited to register on the Website, then they get points for doing "learning" activities, such as watching YouTube videos about various nonprofits.  And they get more points if they comment, tweet or post links or videos to Facebook.  The more points you have, the more chances you get in the lottery for tickets.  

So will it work?  Does clicking "like" on Facebook make someone a true global citizen?  The event is likely attracting a lot of people like myself - who do indeed care about the issue and do want to make a difference.  But it is also likely attracting a lot of regular old music fans.  Who wouldn't click through a bunch of videos online in order to win free tickets to an amazing concert?  It's a small price to pay.

Perhaps the question is: what will happen at the concert itself?  Can one night change thousands of peoples' perspective? Can one event motivate everyone who attends to pitch in for change?

I hope so.  Concerts like this aren't free.  Even if the musicians are donating their time, if you calculate the number of people and number of hours, and the amount of labor (not all of which will be donated, let me tell you), that goes into an endeavor like this, it's a quite a lot.  Between the months and months of planning, the hours spent on marketing, the cost to erect a huge stage and a enormous sound system, the collective amount of time (even if pro-bono) between all of the performers and their crews, there are a HUGE amount of resources being poured into this.  Let's hope it has huge impact too.

Will it?  It's an interesting experiment.  I'll be there 9/29.  And I'm looking forward to reporting back!


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