Hugh Evans: Being a global citizen
Lucy Handley Published 12:00 AM ET Wed, 11 Oct 2017 Updated 1:22 AM ET Mo
01
THE CHALLENGE
Hugh Evans was 2-years-old when Bob Geldof’s charity concert Live Aid beamed images of starving people in north Africa around the world in 1985, raising £30 million ($40.3 million) to help them. And although Evans, now a humanitarian, was too young to remember the event, it ended up being the inspiration behind the “enormous” poverty awareness concert in New York’s Central Park that he organized almost 30 years later.
Neil Young, the Foo Fighters, the Black Keys and John Legend performed at 2012’s first Global Citizen Festival in the U.S. and 60,000 people watched from the park’s Great Lawn. But unlike the original Live Aid, this wasn’t an event people could buy tickets for; instead they had to undertake an “action” to help tackle global poverty, such as lobbying a politician via Twitter.
“Our job is just to create the tools, the technological tools so that you can call your member of Congress with great ease.”
Hugh Evans
“I think that that's what's beautiful about Global Citizen, that it really is in the hands of the citizens themselves. Our job is just to create the tools, the technological tools so that you can call your member of Congress with great ease.” Evans told CNBC's "The Brave Ones."
It’s these actions that have been Evans’ focus, a way to create a movement of people to influence decision-makers to make policy commitments and continue to deliver aid. They are the aims of Global Citizen, the organization Evans founded in 2008 (originally as the Global Poverty Project) with an overall goal to end extreme poverty by 2030.
Global Citizen’s latest European concert was held during the G-20 summit in Hamburg in July, where leaders including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on stage in support of empowering women and girls in the fight for equality. Evans’ influence is such that he got Michelle Obama and first lady of pop Beyonce on stage at the Global Citizen concert in New York in 2015, while earlier this year he visited Malawi with Rihanna on her first trip as Global Partnership for Education ambassador.
I guess I've always been fairly focused.
I've never really worried about what
everyone else is doing. I always from a
young age wanted to do my own thing.
02
THE REVELATION
Evans’ passion to change the world began one night in a Philippines slum. Aged 14, he had won a fundraising competition run by charity World Vision and traveled from his home town of Melbourne, Australia to spend time in Manila to learn about international development.
There he met a teenager called Sonny Boy, and the pair spent a day exploring his home, a slum on the top of a rubbish dump nicknamed “Smoky Mountain”. Evans spent the night with Sonny Boy’s family, lying with six others on a slab of concrete with little to protect them.
“You know, often we (hold) ourselves back out of our own fear of either who we are, or what we stand for, or what we don't stand for.”
Hugh Evans
“It was intense. And just lying there that night it struck me that it was pure chance that I was born in Australia and Sonny Boy was born there. We don't deserve, or we have no entitlement to the lottery of life that we have. And so it struck me that night that this was going to become much bigger and much more important for me. I had to do something. And it became this insatiable passion,” Evans said. Returning home, he lost touch with Sonny Boy, but the pair were to be reunited nearly 20 years on — more of which later.
The young Evans, by his own admission, enjoyed a comfortable childhood in small-town Melbourne, Australia, with the hospital he was born in as well as his high school and local church within a 2 mile radius of home. But he had a vision far bigger than his beginnings.
After the Philippines trip, Evans spent an academic year at Woodstock, an international boarding school near Dehradun, a town close to the Himalayan foothills in India. One day, he had a revelation. “It just struck me at that stage that if a 15-year-old kid from Melbourne who knows very little about the world and just has this desire to learn could be here, I just realized that human beings are capable of things that often we think we're not.
Evans reunites with childhood friend Sonny Boy in Manila, almost 20 years after they first met.
“You know, often we (hold) ourselves back out of our own fear of either who we are, or what we stand for, or what we don't stand for. We think that we have to reach some sort of milestone moment where suddenly it will click and we'll get it. And I realized at that stage that I'm never going to reach that moment. I'm going to have to always strive to achieve change … based on a sheer passion to learn and a sheer inquisition to say ‘I'm going to do everything I can to try to change the world’,” he said.