May 23, 2013 | Culture and Media

Beyonce! J-Lo! Madonna!

What a concert! What a cause!

As far as concerts go, it's going be one of the all-time biggies. Big names (Beyonce, Jay-Z, JLo, Madonna, John Legend, Florence + The Machine, Rita Ora, Timbaland…to name just a few). Big voices. And a super-big audience of one billion expected in the stadium seats and watching via live and delayed broadcasts worldwide.

The Chime for Change concert on June 1, at London’s Twickenham Stadium, has an appropriately big mission, too: To raise money for women's and girls' causes worldwide.

And the brains behind this mega-event? Actress/activist Salma Hayek Pinault and Gucci creative director Frida Giannini, who together created the new nonprofit Chime for Change and got Beyonce to join the founding committee. Gucci is underwriting the entire concert, so all proceeds go to women-centric charities.

Want to help women’s and girls’ causes? Click on Chime for Change.

Chime for Change, then, is more than a concert. It’s a year-round movement to promote education, justice, and health for girls and women. Using Catapult, a crowd-sourced philanthropic site, Chime for Change encourages participants to join teams, led by celebs and ordinary people, that are raising money for favorite projects.

Beyonce, for instance, is focusing on charities that teach leadership to Haitian girls and provide school scholarships in sub-Saharan Africa, while Hayek Pinault is working to bring healthcare to Syrian refugees and train women leaders in Mexico and Guatemala. The Chime for Change website lists dozens of projects, from economic security to maternal health, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, child brides, technology, rights, domestic violence and more. "In the information age…we all share in everything that happens," Hayek Pinault has said. "But that means we also have the chance, the ability, and the responsibility, to right what is wrong."

Back to that concert: Many tiers of tickets are sold out so you best bet is to watch on TV. Broadcast details will be released closer to June 1 and can be found here.  In addition to ticket sales, the concert—officially called The Sound of Change Live—will encourage mobile giving through onstage calls to action. The goal is to fund at least 170 projects via the concert.

And if you can’t make it to London this year, there’s always the one-year anniversary event scheduled for 2014.  After all, as Beyonce says, "It's up to us to change the statistics for women around the world."