Taylor Swift is the first billionaire musician in history, securing her wealth solely from songwriting and performing. She's also one of the highest selling musical artists of all time, earning her over $1.3 billion so far. And she shares this wealth with the hard-working people who help make her incredible performing feats possible. Astoundingly, Swift doled out more than $50 million in bonuses to her crew members who worked on her Eras Tour last year.
Besides her financial success, Swift is also a world class athlete in phenomenal condition. She just danced and sang for nearly four hours straight in front of 90,000 screaming fans—known as Swifties—while performing 45 songs. Numbers courtesy of world class athletes Travis and Jason Kelce.
Imagine how mentally, physically, and emotionally fit she must be to perform at this level for more than 100 shows across five continents. That is a level of ability we typically associate only with global sports icons.
Why does that matter? It matters because we have strong associations with words. We expect them to mean certain things. Taylor the musician is creative, authentic, uplifting. But Taylor the athlete? She is unstoppable. How does she do it? At least in part through her commitment to staying fit through a healthy diet, a key contributor to a strong body and mind.
As a philanthropist, Swift has donated to countless causes. In 2012, she pledged $4 million to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville to provide educational music programs to local children, and another gift in 2014, to help keep the struggling Nashville Symphony open when she donated $100,000.
Her commitment to children's education is longstanding and tremendous. In 2011, she gave $70,000 worth of books to the Reading Public Library in Pennsylvania. Then in 2015, she gave $50,000 to New York Public Schools. It is also enduring—she committed to donate all future royalties from her song "Welcome to New York" to the school system. That is a giant number.
While touring on the road, Taylor loves to donate to local food banks where she's performing to help feed hundreds of thousands of people in each city. She did this recently in California and Tampa, as well as internationally, supporting a U.K. food bank to deliver a year's worth of meals to a local community. Hunger and malnutrition are a global tragedy—1 in 8 households (12.8 percent) in the U.S. experience food insecurity, and in total, more than 700 million people around the world suffer from hunger every day, including 80 million more women than men.
Beyond her own giving, Taylor is a catalyst for change through her music and through her historic fan base, which she constantly encourages to give to favorite causes and groups to make change in their own communities. Taylor once told Country Music Television (CMT), "I started volunteering when I was about 12 years old, and I didn't really know I was volunteering at the time. That's the cool part about volunteering—it doesn't cost anything except your time."
Swift is a strong supporter of women-owned businesses. It's great for so many reasons—for one, they tend to be the more successful entrepreneurs. For another, empowering women economically has been associated with improvements in important nutrition indicators for those women and their households.
Taylor has also supported access to fresh, clean, and safe drinking water. Another great strategy to address malnutrition—not only because water, hygiene, and sanitation are important drivers of nutrition outcomes, but also because women and girls must spend twice as long fetching water outside the home as men and boys, a burden they carry on top of so many others, including feeding and caring for children.
Taylor Swift is already known as a global music icon, and now increasingly as a world class athlete. It's time to recognize her for her philanthropic spirit as well. Through her music, and through her giving, she is a powerful advocate and role model for girls and women's empowerment.
Matt Freeman is executive director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
