UN Live Newsletter: How to meet as equals?

May Newsletter

Creating the Conditions for Connection

Photo: Arte y Maña, Y No Había Luz

Dear friends and fellow change makers,

What does it mean to meet as equals? How best to do it? These are questions we often ponder at The Museum for the United Nations - UN Live, including in this newsletter.

We’ve explored the questions in two new The Shift thought leadership conversations: One with Stina Daag on how movement creates connection across bodies and borders, and one with Jeremy Lent on the worldviews that shape how we respond to planetary crises. In this newsletter, we also present a new policy brief from WHO Europe and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, which UN Live has helped develop. It shares six case studies from across Europe, showing how arts and culture can become a shared space for responding to the health impacts of climate change, helping communities connect, adapt, care for one another, and imagine new ways forward together.

This same thread runs through Sounds Right's new partnership with TuneCore, where artists and storyteller communities are finding new ways to connect, create meaning, and drive action and funds to nature conservation.

Together, they remind us that depth, accessibility, and real solutions can coexist, and that culture reflects and shapes our values.

In short: throughout this newsletter, we explore how culture creates the conditions for connection between people, as well as between innovation, values and the imagination urgently needed to address the world's challenges.

We're glad you're here with us.

Sounds Right Partners with TuneCore

The Sounds Right music initiative has partnered with TuneCore, one of the world’s largest independent music distribution platforms, opening the door for TuneCore’s 500,000+ artists to direct a portion of their royalties toward nature conservation. Called “Give Nature A Split,” the collaboration makes participating in Sounds Right simple, as artists now can simply choose a percentage of how much they’d like to contribute.

Funds flow automatically to the Sounds Right Fund, supporting work in the Amazon, Congo Basin, the Colombian Andes, and soon, ocean conservation projects across Asia-Pacific.

This exciting new partnership between UN Live, Earth Percent and TuneCore marks an important step forward for Sounds Right, strengthening its role as a shared model that enables music platforms and artists to support conservation efforts together while helping grow a wider public conversation about the value of nature.

Paris Paloma Joins NATURE for Earth Month

Kicking off Earth Month in April, the musician Paris Paloma released Miyazaki (with NATURE) — the first remix off her highly anticipated upcoming album, ‘Fatal Flaw’ out in September. The track is a bold, defiant celebration of human creativity, now reimagined with the sounds of rain and birdsong woven throughout. More Sounds Right Feat. NATURE collaborations were released on Earth Day (April 22), featuring FACESOUL, Madame Gandhi, and Halo Music.

Sounds Right Anniversary- Sounds like a load of BS? Who thought this was a good idea?

Not everybody thought it was a good idea. Some media even called it a ridiculous idea and a load of BS. But two years on we’ve proved them wrong.

To celebrate the Sounds Right’s anniversary and NATURE's 2-years as an official music artist, the creative agency and Sounds Right partner AKQA created a film to spotlight Sounds Right's global impact. So far the Sounds Right initiative has generated more that 500 million streams, engaged more than 30M fans, featured tracks by +200 artists who've included sounds of the natural world in their music - such as Hozier, AURORA, David Bowie, and V of BTS and many more, as found on Spotify.

In addition, by the end of 2026 the Sounds Right Fund will have allocated +$1.2M in revenue to frontline conservation by the end of 2026. And we are just getting started. Thanks millions to all the wonderful partners behind Sounds Right, including Earth Percent, AKQA, Spotify, The Listening Planet, Vozterra and many, many others..

Check out this celebratory anniversary video:

Watch the new Sounds Right Film

Gabriel Smales, Global Programme Director for Sounds Right, spoke about Sounds Right and NATURE the Artist at ChangeNOW in Paris, France;

The Shift: Q&A with Stina Daag & Jeremy Lent

We are continuing the UN Live thought leader Q&A series with conversations with environmentalists, activists, artists, storytellers, and cultural leaders on the power of popular culture and how it can shift mindsets, and generate the collective energy needed for change.

In May, we featured two voices exploring how culture and worldview shape our capacity to meet each other as equals and respond to planetary crisis: Stina Daag, founder of Human Shift and pioneer of somatic practices that reconnect us to our bodies and each other, and Jeremy Lent, author and founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition, exploring how the stories we tell about the world determine the futures we can imagine.

"We really need to connect to each other and to nature as an active act of survival." — Stina Daag

Movement activist Stina Daag reflects on how the body becomes a bridge across difference. Genuine connection happens not through words alone, but through shared breath, rhythm, and vulnerability. When we anchor ourselves in our bodies rather than numbing through constant scrolling, we create space for intimate connection that ripples out into the world.

📖 Read the full Q&A with Stina Daag

"We are not separate from life—we are life." — Jeremy Lent

Ecocivilization thinker Jeremy Lent explores how the dominant worldview has shaped both our crisis and our possibilities. Like water to a fish, we're embedded in a story of separation and extraction without even recognising it. Once we see the lens we're looking through, we can choose a different one. The new story begins with recognising we are not isolated selves, but part of a living process unfolding across billions of years.

📖 Read the full Q&A with Jeremy Lent

More Shift Q&As will follow soon — keep an eye on our social media channels.

Strong Connection Between Arts and Health - New Policy Brief from WHO Europe and Jameel Arts

Earlier this month, the WHO Regional Office for Europe and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab published a policy brief, which UN Live helped develop, making the case for something we at UN Live have long believed: that arts and culture are not peripheral to the climate health crisis, they are central to how we respond to it.

The brief, "Role of the Arts and Culture in Addressing the Health Impacts of Climate Change", draws on a literature review, an international expert survey, and over 30 literature submissions from practitioners around the world. It argues that technical solutions alone will not be enough to drive change, and that cultural transformation is essential to how societies understand, communicate, and adapt to climate change.

UN Live has dived deeper into six of the case studies, the brief highlights, and turned them into a series of stories on our website. These are stories about culture doing serious, measurable work in the world. They include an animated film that helped stop Shell’s seismic drilling off the South African coast, a community of women in Delhi stitching their experiences of air pollution into tapestries that reached half a million people online, and a gallery programme in New South Wales helping reduce anxiety in children affected by climate disasters.

Together the case studies and the stories show the power of arts and culture in the intersection between health and climate change . Head to our website to read the full series, and follow the link here to access the policy brief itself.

What We Are Reading, Watching, and Listening to This Month:

Reading:

The Astonishing Relationship Between Life and Temperature
Ricken Patel explores a simple but profound truth that life on Earth exists within an incredibly narrow temperature band. This emphasises the story of why a few degrees matter more than we think, and why the planet's temperature stability has been the invisible foundation for everything we know as civilization.
🔗 Read the essay

Listening:

Why Do We Listen to the Talkers More Than the Builders Saving the Planet?
Former Google X inventor Tom Chi asks a provocative question: why do we spend more time listening to people who talk about climate than the people actually building solutions? In this Creative Process interview, Chi (now founding partner of At One Ventures) argues that our crucial decade needs more builders and less ideology. "Spend most of your time with the people that actually build," he says. "Those people have built integrity. Quality of contribution is the thing that dominates." His new book, Climate Capital, reframes economics not as a design discipline that can be reimagined to align with planetary realities.
🔗 Listen to the interview

Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff's podcast continues to be one of the sharpest examinations of how technology, culture, and economics shape (and sometimes distort) what it means to be human. If you're tired of tech optimism that ignores power dynamics, or climate doom that paralyzes action, this is the antidote.
🔗 Listen on Apple Podcasts

Watching:

Block by Block: Minecraft as Urban Planning Tool
What happens when you give youth in informal settlements a voice in designing their own public spaces? Since 2012, the Block by Block partnership between Mojang, Microsoft, and UN-Habitat has been using Minecraft to involve marginalized communities in urban design. From Kibera, Nairobi to Kosovo to East Jerusalem, more than 30,000 community members (women, children, elders, refugees, and the disabled) have participated in workshops where they rebuild their neighborhoods in Minecraft, then present their designs to city officials, where the results become real public spaces.

🔗 Watch how it works

Wild Concerto: When Animals Become the Soloist
Stewart Copeland (the drummer from The Police) teamed up with naturalist Martyn Stewart to create something unprecedented. Wild Concerto is an orchestral album where hyenas, wolves, owls, and frogs aren't background sounds, they're the soloists. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, Copeland wrote compositions around Stewart's archive of nearly 100,000 wildlife recordings, some from species now extinct or endangered. The result is both beautiful and haunting. As Stewart puts it, "Two-thirds of the species in my library are now basically extinct."

🔗 Read the 60 Minutes story

Your Favorite Influencer Might Be AI: Galaxy Brain

Charlie Warzel is joined by New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu to discuss the rise of AI influencers, synthetic personalities that are increasingly populating social media feeds. As AI-generated content creators gain followers and brand deals, what does this mean for authenticity, trust, and the future of online culture?
🔗 Watch on YouTube

Partnerships Updates

None of this work happens in isolation, we’re grateful to be working alongside and be supported by 15 Juni Fonden, William Demant Foundation, Tuborg Foundation, Aage Jensen Naturfonden, L-Acoustics, The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Spotify, Porticus, the Hempel Foundation, and Tsao Family Foundation—partners who make these initiatives possible.