About the Event

Co-Authored by Future Peacebuilder Fellows, Rebecca Arnieri, Sophie Raimondo, and Sharjil Hassan. 

1. Opening: Practicing Partnership at the HLPF

As governments and stakeholders gathered in New York for the 2026 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), UPEACE NY and Amplifier Art convened an official side event to explore what meaningful partnership looks like in practice. Titled Intersectionality Across Generations: An Emphasis on SDG 17, the event brought together diplomats, researchers, peacebuilders, artists, community practitioners, and civil society leaders for a conversation that extended beyond institutional dialogue to examine how peace is built through relationships, trust, and shared responsibility.

Held at United Nations Headquarters and continued through a community gathering at 777 UN Plaza, the event combined panel discussions, participatory dialogue, poetry, and reflection to bridge policy and practice. Participants explored how more inclusive partnerships can emerge by recognizing experiences, knowledge systems, and perspectives often overlooked in formal decision-making. Throughout the day, one idea remained central: sustainable peace depends not only on working together, but on expanding who is invited to shape the conversation.

2. Why SDG 17 and Why Now?

Each year, the HLPF provides an opportunity to assess progress toward the SDGs while fostering dialogue on the challenges that remain. At a time marked by armed conflict, climate change, inequalities, and growing polarization, UPEACE NY chose to center its side event on SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, recognizing that sustainable peace cannot be achieved by governments or institutions acting alone. It requires cooperation among governments, organizations, communities, and individuals across sectors, identities, and generations.

Throughout the discussions, partnership was understood not simply as institutional cooperation, but as a practice grounded in trust, humility, shared responsibility, and the willingness to center and take seriously diverse forms of knowledge traditionally left at the margins, or outside the room entirely. Participants reflected on strengthening connections across generations while ensuring that those closest to conflict help shape solutions.

3. Understanding Intersectionality Across Generations

The event approached intersectionality not as a synonym for diversity, but as a framework for understanding how overlapping identities and systems of power shape whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is recognized, and who participates in decision-making. Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the concept highlights how factors such as race, gender, age, class, nationality, professional role, and institutional authority interact to influence people's experiences of inclusion and exclusion.

Within this context, "across generations" meant far more than bringing together younger and older participants. It called for an exchange between institutional experience and community practice, policy expertise and lived experience, and academic, Indigenous, ecological, artistic, and spiritual ways of knowing. Throughout the discussions, speakers returned to a common insight: sustainable peace depends not only on bringing diverse people into the room, but also on recognizing the legitimacy of multiple ways of knowing and sharing authority across sectors, communities, and generations. Rather than a source of division, difference became a foundation for collective learning and more resilient peacebuilding.

4. Practicing Partnership Inside the UN

The principles explored throughout the event were reflected in the way the gathering itself unfolded. Inside Conference Room 7 at United Nations Headquarters, Melissa Wild, Executive Director of UPEACE NY; Roberto Avendaño Sancho, Chargé d’Affaires a.i. of Costa Rica to the United Nations; and Cleo Barnett, Executive Director of Amplifier, opened the event by emphasizing that partnership extends beyond formal agreements. It is expressed through how people listen, build trust, and share responsibility.

The panel brought together Ayanna Behin of the New York Peace Institute, Irene Karimou of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Emilie McGlone of Peace Boat US, Catherine Panter-Brick of Yale University, and Léonie Weerakoon, human ecologist and Managing Director of Kinetik. Their work spans mediation, nonviolence, public health, anthropology, ecology, youth engagement, and community practice.

Across their different areas of expertise, a common message emerged: trust must come before outcomes. Sustainable collaboration requires humility, time, reciprocity, and an acknowledgment that institutions do not hold all the answers.

The panel also challenged narrow definitions of expertise. Academic and policy knowledge remain important, but knowledge also lives in memory, art, spiritual traditions, Indigenous practices, and everyday community experience. These forms of knowledge should be valued on their own terms rather than translated solely into institutional language.

The gathering closed with a small but intentional shift. Instead of holding a traditional question-and-answer session in which participants directed every question toward the panel, they were invited to turn toward one another. As Gay Rosenblum-Kumar reflected, both wisely and playfully, “We are getting better at connecting with each other, and not only talking about connecting with each other.” The invitation repositioned participants from recipients of information to active contributors to the conversation. By softening the division between the panel and the audience, the gathering created space for mutual exchange and demonstrated the kind of partnership it had spent the morning exploring.

5. Continuing the Conversation Beyond the UN

The movement from United Nations Headquarters to 777 UN Plaza allowed the conversation to continue in a more intimate setting. Inside the UN, the dialogue unfolded within a space shaped by diplomacy, policy, protocol, and global commitments. At 777 UN Plaza, participants had greater room for vulnerability, personal reflection, and dimensions of peacebuilding that do not always fit easily within formal institutional language. Rather than leaving institutional work behind, the gathering brought it closer to everyday experience, allowing participants to speak not only from their professional roles but also from their histories, communities, and beliefs.

The second gathering opened with a poetic offering by Serena Dokuaa Oduro. Her poetry demonstrated how art can express truths that may be deeply felt but difficult to communicate through the language of policy or institutions. She emphasized and advocated for a Black Feminist approach to peacebuilding and to institutional change, naming that a Black Feminism is a theoretical underpinning that ensures equity, justice and peace for all peoples. Léonie Weerakoon then moderated a roundtable with Gay Rosenblum-Kumar, whose experiences included peacebuilding during South Africa’s transition from apartheid; Serena, whose work connects poetry, technology, and artificial intelligence policy; Liliane Nkunzimana, who brought the Bahá’í call to unity into the conversation; and Johanna Toruño, whose public art and community organizing reclaim the street as a place of memory, visibility, and belonging.

Together, their perspectives expanded the meaning of partnership introduced earlier in the day. Institutional experience, spirituality, poetry, technology, public art, and community organizing each offered a distinct pathway into the shared work of building peace, demonstrating what intersectionality across generations can look like in practice.

6. Peace is a Practice

The event also served as the launch of Peace Is a Practice, the first in a three-part series developed by UPEACE NY and Amplifier Art. The global arts and education campaign explores peace as something people actively build through relationships, creativity, dialogue, and collective action. Through educational resources, artistic storytelling, and opportunities for participation, it invites artists, educators, students, families, peacebuilders, and communities across cultures and lived realities to explore how conflict can become a source of learning and transformation.

Across both gatherings, participants put this understanding into practice by listening across differences and creating space for institutional, artistic, spiritual, and lived knowledge. Poetry, public art, participatory dialogue, and personal reflection became practical ways of cultivating connection and understanding.

7. Conclusion

The conversations held during the 2026 HLPF remind us that partnerships are not measured only by agreements or institutions, but by the relationships we choose to build and sustain. By bringing together diverse generations, disciplines, and ways of knowing, UPEACE NY and Amplifier demonstrated that inclusive dialogue is itself a form of peacebuilding, as an art to be nourished.

As the world continues to confront complex global challenges, the event reaffirmed that achieving the SDGs and lasting peace requires partnerships that welcome different voices, experiences, and ways of knowing. In this spirit, peace is not simply a goal to be reached, but a practice strengthened through the relationships we build every day. The potential for real social progress through peace is found when alternative ways of knowing are both seen and put into practice within institutions such as the United Nations. Innovative partnerships can help achieve these next steps - on the sidelines of UNGA 81, UPEACE NY and Amplifier Art will uplift the ideas generated through these sessions in July and further the dialogue of how to implement them within institutions for peace.