Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award 2024 (Prize of US $250,000)

Global Citizen, also known as Global Poverty Project, is an international education and advocacy organization that seeks to catalyze the movement to end extreme poverty and promote social justice and equity through the lens of intersectionality. The organization was founded by Hugh Evans, Simon Moss and Wei Soo, and aims to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action to support the cause.

Global Citizen’s vision is, upon itself, a world without extreme poverty by 2030.[7] To achieve this, the organization works with people to make a difference in the present, and focuses on improving the future by changing the systems and policies that keep people in poverty, by utilizing education, communications, advocacy, campaigning, and the media.

The organization researches and selects causes to support, and then suggests actions for its members to take in support of those causes. This can include sending tweets to organizations like the United Nations in support of reducing pollution, signing petitions to support gender equality, sending pre-written emails to politicians to increase international aid, or providing rewards to encourage people to get involved. Each cause supports the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, one of which includes eliminating poverty by 2030.

Global Citizen was founded in 2008 as the Global Poverty Project in Melbourne, Australia and has since opened additional offices in London, Berlin, Toronto, Lagos, and Johannesburg and is now headquartered in New York. Since its launch the organization has:

• Developed 1.4 Billion Reasons – a multimedia presentation that explains the issues that contribute to extreme poverty, and what everyday people can do about them.
• Helped launch the international advocacy and fundraising campaign Live Below the Line – engaging more than 24,000 people with the lack of choice inherent in extreme poverty, and raising more than $5 million for anti-poverty initiatives.
• Grown political support for polio eradication and raised more than $118 million for critical vaccination programs through The End of Polio campaign.
• Launched the Global Citizen Prize in 2016, a series of awards aimed at honoring activists and leaders around the world.

The Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award was established by Cisco and Global Citizen to recognize and lift up a young person positively impacting the world, demonstrate the impact that young people are having on achieving the United Nation’s Global Goals, and accelerate global problem solving.