A social enterprise that donates booking fees from tickets for festivals, concerts and events to children’s charities has been recognised with a Committee for Sydney award.
Humanitix co-founders, Josh Ross and Adam McCurdie, have been recognised as emerging leaders by the Committee for Sydney as part of the thinktank’s annual awards alongside other New South Wales business and culture leaders.
The school friends started Humanitix in 2016 and it has grown rapidly, now ticketing about 14,000 events at any one time with operations in Australia, New Zealand and the US.
“Live events and events ticketing are notorious for charging booking fees, and these booking fees add up to billions of dollars across the planet,” McCurdie said.
“Our idea was simple, which was: can you create a ticketing platform that gives away all the profits from these booking fees to funding the most impactful children’s charities … so that we can transform what was previously a resented fee into millions, maybe even billions of dollars of funding every year, into things that really matter?”
While the social enterprise initially struggled when live events were suddenly cancelled in 2020, the business worked with organisers on ways to run events online or offer vouchers for future events and was able to keep growing.
“These were creative ways to help our thousands of event hosts stay afloat,” McCurdie said.
He said the company was now donating more than $1m to partner charities every year and hoped to become one of the world’s biggest ticketing platforms. Humanitix has backing from Google and Atlassian.
Award judge and executive dean of the Macquarie Business School, Prof Eric Knight, said it provided an exciting example for up and coming business founders on how to make a social impact.
“Humanitix takes a part of our life that is very transactional – buying tickets – and turns it into something that’s transformational, making a difference in the world,” he said.
“They realised people want to be transformational even when they do really mundane activities like buying tickets to a concert. They’ve found a way to inspire a generation of business leaders to think about business for good.”
Ross and McCurdie were recognised for their work as part of the Sydney Awards that seek to celebrate and elevate people working to “make Sydney the best city in the world”.
The Sydney Opera House chief executive, Louise Herron, was awarded the city visionary award for her work to “invigorate and reposition” the cultural centre.
Herron was the first woman appointed to the top job at the Opera House and recently oversaw its major renewal program.
The global Sydney award was handed to outgoing artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, Stephen Page, who helmed the company for more than 30 years.
“For me to be coming from the seedlings of that and then to be a director of the company at the age of 25, traveling throughout the country and globally, it’s a big responsibility,” Page said.
“I might be the leader of this company artistically, but Bangarra started as a clan. It moves as a mob. So when you are the one up the front accepting this award, you know you have a clan of people that are accepting this as well.”
Dr Catherine Keenan was named the winner of the unsung hero award for her work with Story Factory – a not-for-profit creative writing centre – that has welcomed almost 45,000 young people since opening a decade ago.
The Western Sydney champion award went to Hedayat Osyan for his work training refugees in construction after he himself struggled to find work after fleeing Afghanistan in 2010.
