Cityzens Giving, Manchester City’s global community initiative, which helps Young Leaders around the world change lives through the power of football, is back for a fifth year.
Once again, fans have the power to choose which projects they want to support, with City Football Group and its partners contributing £400,000 towards this year’s campaign, totalling over £2.4m since Cityzens Giving started in 2014.
From Manchester to Melbourne, New York City to Bangalore and São Paolo to Kilifi, City Football Group has selected six urban football projects which it will help support through funding and community football training. The projects, which are run by young people, for young people, all use football as a tool to tackle challenging social issues and change lives.
Focusing on girls’ empowerment, social inclusion, connecting communities, safe water, education and HIV prevention, the Cityzens Giving projects are all ran by forward-looking Young Leaders, who share a combined love and passion for football and a desire to advance their communities.
Cityzens Giving will also unlock the expertise of City’s partners to support and facilitate projects. Water technology company, Xylem, will be getting behind a clean water project in Bangalore and software and technology experts, SAP, will be using their data analytics to measure the impact of projects in New York City, Manchester and beyond.
Over the course of a six-week campaign, fans will hear first-hand from the Young Leaders in each of the six projects and will be asked to vote for the one that resonates with them the most. The more votes a project gets, the greater amount of funding it will receive.
Ferran Soriano, Chief Executive of City Football Group, said: “We at City Football Group are very proud about Cityzens Giving. Once again, we are investing in the future through these football projects around the world and the inspirational Young Leaders who are using the power of football in the most positive ways imaginable.
“These young people have incredible stories and have committed themselves to using the world’s most loved, watched and played sport to impact their own communities and tackle social issues which need our support. We are proud to help them change perceptions of life in their cities using our shared love for football. In the last year alone, we have helped to train 300 Young Leaders, who have in turn delivered programmes to 15,000 young people.
“We are again very happy to connect with our fans around the world and give them the power to positively impact these great projects.”
From today, fans from across the City Football Group network can vote for their preferred cause at: www.mancity.com/cityzensgiving
