Foo Fighters, Black Keys + More to Rock ‘Global Festival’ in Fight Against Poverty

Foo Fighters and the Black Keys are among the acts who will be playing the Global Festival on Sept. 29 in New York City’s Central Park. The two rock groups will be joined by Band of Horses, K’naan and classic rock legend Neil Young at the massive concert, which aims to help spread awareness and raise funds for the global epidemic of poverty.

The Global Festival’s goal is not only to increase awareness, but to redefine how a charitable concert operates. Since Central Park’s ‘Great Lawn’ is a public space, all tickets to the Global Festival, by rule, must be free and distributed by a random lottery. Thus, fans looking to attend the Global Festival can enter its lottery by taking action rather than simply entering their name. Fans can become eligible to win two Global Festival tickets in a number of ways, from making donations to educating themselves about various issues via the online and app-based platform Global Citizen.

“The standard model for this kind of event is you sell a ticket through Ticketmaster for $60 or $70 and a portion of that goes to charity,” Global Poverty Project co-founder Hugh Evans tells Rolling Stone. “We wanted Global Festival to be about action, not money. By thinking different about how we distribute tickets, we’re building a movement.”

Foo Fighters proclaimed in an official statement, “We are very proud to be lending a hand to such a creative, important event and are looking forward to adding to the noise in the big park and helping the effort toward reducing the global shame of deep poverty.”

The Black Keys also offered their excitement about the event. “All of us come from Ohio, so we grew up around working-class, hard-working people, but getting a global view makes you want to give back even more,” explains Black Keys manager John Peets. “It just seemed to make a lot of sense: this is a cause we all felt was universal enough to get behind.”

Find out more about the Global Festival and enter the ticket lottery at GlobalPovertyProject.com