For more than a decade, IFAC has stood behind Sing for Hope’s mission to harness the arts as a force for human connection, education, and hope. That commitment was on full display at one of the most significant diplomatic gatherings of 2025: the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, where the Sing for Hope HandaHarmony Youth Chorus took to the stage, and a twelve-year-old student stepped to the podium to address world leaders about why the arts matter.

Marking eighty years since the UN was founded to prevent future conflict and advance cooperation between nations, the session drew representatives from 193 nations to New York for the 80th session of the UN General Assembly. This year’s theme, “Better Together: 80 Years and More for Peace, Development and Human Rights,” carried both commemoration and challenge. The General Debate ran from September 23rd to 30th, where delegates addressed priorities including climate action ahead of COP 30, financing the Sustainable Development Goals, and governance frameworks for emerging technologies.

Yet the most striking moment of the week came from the voices of children. The Sing for Hope HandaHarmony Youth Chorus, supported by the IFAC’s Chairman Dr. Haruhisa Handa in his role as Sing for Hope’s Global Patron, performed in the UNGA Hall alongside members of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. For a rare moment, heads of state, Nobel Laureates, and global delegates set aside the weight of their agendas and listened together, bound by music.

For the sixth consecutive year, the HandaHarmony Youth Chorus brought its vision of creative youth leadership to the UN’s global stage. The chorus, whose members range in age from eight to eighteen, has become a living emblem of what IFAC and Sing for Hope have long believed: that the arts are not peripheral to global progress, but foundational to it.

That belief was given voice not only in song but in spoken testimony. During a High-Level Side Event on Social Business, Youth and Technology, Sing for Hope’s Co-Founders Camille Zamora and Monica Yunus invited to the podium Lauren Martin, a twelve-year-old Sing for Hope student, who spoke to assembled world leaders about the life-changing role of arts education in underserved communities. Her remarks drew on her experience with the Sing for Hope Global Goals Arts Curriculum, a free digital platform through which young people across the world engage with urgent issues, from climate change to social justice, through creativity and imagination.

“The arts are our lingua franca,” said Co-Founder Camille Zamora, “reminding us that what we have in common is greater than what divides us. As such, the arts deserve a place at the policymaking table as a public good, fast-tracking progress across all key sectors, from education to diplomacy to public health.”

Monica Yunus echoed her co-founder, drawing on the wisdom of her father, Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus: human creativity, she said, is unlimited, and it is the capacity of humans to make things happen that have never happened before that drives genuine progress. Sing for Hope’s work, she continued, operates in the spirit of UN Sustainable Development Goal 17, forging partnerships that bring arts programming to hospitals, schools, and public spaces worldwide.

This week also saw Sing for Hope named the first arts organisation invited to become an Official Partner of The Global Committee on Social Business for the Sustainable Development Goals, a cross-sector body dedicated to driving knowledge, creativity, and innovation in pursuit of the SDGs.

Also unveiled at the UN this week: the Sing for Hope HandaHarmony Piano, decorated with SDG-themed artwork and now part of the UN’s permanent art collection. It joins Sing for Hope’s global fleet of playable art pieces, which have reached millions of people across more than fifty cities and six continents.

As Dr. Haruhisa Handa has long maintained, culture is not incidental to global affairs. It creates the conditions of trust, empathy, and civic imagination that make cooperation possible at all. At UNGA 80, that conviction was demonstrated not in words from a delegate but in the harmonies of the world’s youngest global citizens, standing at the centre of its most important conversation.

Learn more on Sing For Hope’s website: https://www.singforhope.org/

Explore IFAC’s programmes and discover how cultural exchange and creativity can strengthen communities: https://ifac-global.org/youth-education