CITY FOOTBALL GROUP’S FAN-LED GLOBAL COMMUNITY INITIATIVE
The New York City Football announced Group’s (CFG) global community work uses soccer to enrich the lives of children and young people in 18 cities around the world
Starting today, CFG’s network of fans can vote on allocation of funding across six global community soccer projects
This year’s campaign will take the total funding amount for Cityzens Giving by CFG and its partners to more than $2.5 million by 2018
New York City FC has announced the return of its Group-wide global charity initiative, Cityzens Giving, and is calling on fans to pledge their support. The initiative funds community soccer projects run by young people, created to tackle pressing issues affecting their communities including crime prevention, girls’ empowerment and disability inclusion.
For the fourth year, fans of CFG’s family of clubs – including New York City FC, Manchester City and Melbourne City FC – will decide how a $500,000 charitable fund is split by voting for one of six causes that inspires them the most. The more votes a project gets, the more funding it will receive.
CFG will be working in collaboration with established charity partners in New York City, Manchester, Melbourne, Bangkok, Guangzhou and Los Angeles. Projects combine youth led project delivery with soccer pitch building and refurbishing, where needed.
Here in New York City, Cityzens Giving will provide the funding needed for local Young Leaders to design and deliver free soccer programs in underserved neighborhoods all across the five boroughs. This includes programming on the 50 New York City Soccer Initiative (NYCSI) mini-pitches that are being built over the next five years thanks to this public-private partnership between New York City FC, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance NYC, the U.S. Soccer Foundation, adidas and Etihad Airways.
CFG Chief Executive, Ferran Soriano, said:
“Since the Cityzens Giving initiative launched in 2014, we have trained 750 young leaders in 18 cities around the world who have in turn, worked with 23,000 children and young people in their communities.
“We are immensely proud of our community work that empowers better lives through the universal language of football. By placing fans at the heart of the decision making we are creating a truly connected global community.”
Young Leader Ebrahim, 20, is a shining example of how fan votes from the Cityzens Giving campaign can impact lives of local young people right here in New York City. Raised in the Bronx, Ebrahim has been actively involved in one of the local NYC Cityzen Giving community projects. Starting out as a participant, Ebrahim has now moved into a leadership role as a Young Leader where he delivers the free soccer programming to younger kids. His program is funded by votes for the New York City project as part of the Cityzens Giving campaign.
Ebrahim shared how this free soccer programming has benefited both himself and the wider New York City community. He commented, “Our program allows anyone to come and play for free and if you don’t know how to play soccer we’ll provide training so you can improve. It was founded to help young kids by giving them something to do on Friday or Saturday night. It gets them off the street and brings them together.
“In New York City, everyone wants to stick with what they know. They don’t want to integrate. Only a few people have an open heart to allow people in. If we don’t try and change things it will create more isolation and more conflict between people.
“I’m trying to change that, to bring people into our program so they could know how it feels to hang out and play with people from different nationalities and backgrounds. We will use soccer to change people’s minds. Through our fun sport people can see there is brotherhood between people from different nationalities.”
Starting today, fans from across the CFG network can vote for their preferred cause at:
https://www.cityzensgiving.org/newyork.
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