This article originally appeared in Modern Day Utah Pioneers, a publication sponsored by Clarke Capital.
Utah has long been known as a place where a pioneering spirit and a commitment to bettering the lives of others define its people. Lindsay Hadley exemplifies what these values look like when applied globally, as her innovative fundraising and brilliant advocacy have been nothing short of transformative for millions of lives across the world.
A career rooted in social impact and innovation
Hadley’s journey into the world of social impact began in college. As the president of the Rotaract Club, she decided to change the traditional fundraising model from selling boxes of oranges to putting on a benefit concert with a national touring artist.
“I thought it would be more fun and that more college kids would come,” Hadley says. Instead of raising the typical $6,000, the club raised over $100,000, setting a national record. Hadley was honored with a trip to London to receive an award for her clubs’ impact in Cambodia, and she was hooked on helping people.
Hadley’s first job out of college was with Youthlinc, where she coordinated about 10 service trips per year. It was adventurous, challenging and rewarding work, but with the birth of her first son, Hadley moved back into fundraising and event production and became known as the “charity concert lady.”
In 2010, Hadley produced her first music festival to raise money for the Child Rescue Association of North America, but unfortunately, the event lost money. Linday was devastated. She had never worked harder on anything and felt responsible to her board, volunteers and donors for the mission they hadn’t fulfilled, but her despair didn’t last long. The next day, she realized she needed to pick herself up and make things right. She bravely cold-called Bill Fold, a founding member of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Fold reassured her that loss was normal in the first year and that she had actually done a remarkable job. He agreed to mentor her, help her with her next event to pay back the donors, and set her back on the path to success.
In 2011, Hadley went on to change the trajectory of her career with the The End of Polio Concert in Australia. As executive producer, Hadley and her team at Global Citizen — formerly known as The Global Poverty Project — brilliantly deployed unique strategies of using top-down government money combined with public voice and advocacy. While the traditional charity model relies on ticket and merchandise sales and sponsorship for the profit margin, Hadley and her team had people sign petitions to win concert tickets and found sponsors to underwrite the event. Prime ministers and presidents of the Commonwealth were converging in Australia to meet about their social agendas, and Hadley used this constituency demonstration to show the government that they should give money from the foreign aid budget to end polio.
Hadley’s team presented the prime minister with 30,000 petitions, which led the government to make a funding commitment of $59 million. Bill Gates matched the funds. This groundbreaking event raised $118 million to help deem India polio-free, according to the World Health Organization.
This success marked a turning point in Hadley’s career, paving the way for her involvement as executive producer and chief development officer of Global Citizen (formerly the Global Poverty Project) as they employed the same strategies for the annual Global Citizen music festival held in Central Park in New York City. In 2012, Hadley’s team gathered artists such as Neil Young, Foo Fighters, Black Eyed Peas and many others, raising $1.2 billion by leveraging resources through the United Nations General Assembly. Global Citizen is now in its 12th year and has raised over $45 billion for the world’s poor. Many major artists have taken the stage, including Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and more.
Driven to succeed for and empower others
One of the hallmarks of Hadley’s career is her ability to work with high-profile individuals and organizations to amplify social impact. Whether she is working with prime ministers, presidents, Bill and Melinda Gates, Hugh Jackman, Richard Branson, Kevin Bacon, Gerard Butler, Mark Burnett or Katie Couric, she doesn’t take any self-satisfaction in the circles she finds herself in. Hadley is humble and down-to-earth. She is just a girl from Kamas, Utah, trying to make a difference the best way she knows how.
The point Hadley hopes people walk away with is this: We all have the capacity to enact change; it is simply a matter of refusing to let mistakes (or the fear of making mistakes) distract us from the human lives at stake. She audaciously runs toward suffering, inspiring so many to follow her lead.
In addition to all of her other accomplishments, Hadley became the director of client relations at Capita Financial Network in 2022. There, her initiatives have focused on creating opportunities and economic mobility for women through events, experiences and networking opportunities. “As much as I love [the state of] Utah and all of its magic, it is No. 50 out of 50 in the United States for gender equality,” she says. “Economically, we’re the most behind when it comes to women in finance.”
Film initiatives and cultural impact
Today, Hadley is carving out a role in film production that blends storytelling with advocacy. As co-founder of Harbor Fund — a first-of-its-kind 501(c)(3) sustainable fund for social impact films — Hadley produces documentaries and narrative films that shed light on social injustices and promote cross-cultural understanding. Her approach uses the power of storytelling to ignite empathy and galvanize audiences into action, reflecting Hadley’s belief in the transformative power of media.
“I think the stories we tell are the most powerful things we do as human beings,” Hadley says. “From ending apartheid to addressing human rights and women’s rights issues, it began with telling ourselves new stories. I believe every powerful thing as human beings that we could ever accomplish — from the Wright brothers bending pieces of metal to fly through the air to the AI we’re now using that is blowing everybody’s minds — are all just stories that started in someone’s heart. Jesus of Nazareth told stories 2,000 years ago that impact the entire world today; these parables have lasted millennia. I really believe that if I can leverage philanthropic dollars and benevolent people with good hearts to hijack the most powerful PR engine in the world — Hollywood — that is so indelibly powerful.”
Personal reflections
Hadley’s persistence in meeting the needs of so many underserved populations is admirable, but she doesn’t shy away from sharing her mistakes and failures along the way. Speaking of one particular scenario, Hadley says, “I was so wrapped up in external validation and what people thought of me instead of just making the right choice. I’ve learned the difference between reputation and character. While reputation is what people think of you, character is who you truly are. This distinction has guided my decisions and shaped my approach to leadership.”
At home, Hadley and her husband prioritize instilling values such as character, empathy and social responsibility in their children, exposing them to diverse cultures and global issues from a young age.
“We always have different people from all over the world at our dinner table,” Hadley says. “It might be captains of industry, celebrities, government leaders, refugees or people doing heroic, front-line humanitarian aid work. There are so many talented and amazing people to whom they have been exposed. Our children have gone on humanitarian trips with us. We lived in Africa for months. They’ve been exposed to a lot of extreme poverty, and these experiences have brought awareness to them of how blessed we are.”
Looking ahead, Hadley remains focused on expanding her impact through her newest initiatives while never losing focus on what has driven her from the start: impacting lives.
“The most powerful things in my career are the one-on-one lives that get changed or the one-on-one relationships I’ve built,” she says. “And not always just someone living in poverty, although I’ve had amazing opportunities to be involved in seeing a life transformed. It’s also just seeing every day that when we use whatever we’re doing as a modality to become who God wants us to be, … [we] can change one person’s world. The reason I keep doing the impossible and sometimes falling flat on my face is because I know who I’m becoming.”