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Our UN Day Festival will open with Peace Child’s signature song, “World” by David Gordon. It summarises the key data that the UN holds about our world and the challenges it faces. Also – David is working on a new song to express his vision of the World he’d like to bequeath to his children and grand-children.

It was David’s idea to use the UN Day Festival to launch a kind of Eurovision Song Contest for the Planet – for the United Nations and its values.  He wants to inspire and incentivise young people to write and record their songs for the Planet.  Songs like Let’s Make Peace written for Peace Child by 16-year old Pawel Sydor from Poland which, in its chorus, captures perfectly the yearning that young people everywhere have for the Planet’s future:

We want this world to survive for ever
And all the people join their hands together
In a bond of love, kindness and friendship,
We’ll make peace here with the earth.

We don’t have many youth-composed songs on our website: Ella’s song, written by Ella Vituk and Mychta by Coleen Barry for Peace Child are perennial favorites.  Katie Christie and her Voices United group in Miami wrote some great new songs, like Zoe’s Age of Violence – which was an instant classic. These are the kind of songs we want more of. And we will give a prize of £500 to the author of every song we use in the show.

We seek songs by young people under 20-years old but, if you need help arranging and recording your songs, that’s fine.  We trust you! Songs may be in any style from rock and pop to jazz, rap, folk, gospel, operatic, classical.

Subject? We want songs that carry a hard-headed appeal for humanity’s survival. Hans Rosling, in his great book, Factfulness, identified 5 x global threats to our Survival that we “should be worried about.”  They are:

  1. Global Pandemics;
  2. World War III (nuclear war);
  3. Climate Change;
  4. Financial Collapse;
  5. Extreme Poverty;

In this first UN Day Festival, we shall be focussing on Pandemics, Nuclear Disarmament and Climate Change. So it would be great if your song could focus on one of these.

To submit your entry click register below:

By using this link to submit your song, you confirm you agree to our  Terms and Conditions outlined in the  Small Print (below)

Sign up for the Newsletter here:

Small  Print

All songs, statements and stories are subject to the following, legally binding understanding.

  1. All songs and statements must be the original work of a young person aged 8 to 20 years old;
  2. Stories may be written and read by people of any age, and songs may be arranged, played and recorded by musicians, singers, engineers and videographers of any age.
  3. Each song and statement must be between 2 & 5-minutes long;
  4. Each song and statement must be supplied in text form in both the original language and English;
  5. Each song must be recorded in MP4; .MOV; WMV; FLV; AVI; AVCHD; WebM;  MKV format;
  6. Each song, statement and story remains the sole property of the young person who wrote it (“The Author”) and those to whom s/he gave a share of their rights for assistance with recording and/or arrangement;
  7. Peace Child International (“The Producer”) reserves the right to broadcast the song in the context of the UN Day Festival itself, and promotion thereof, and for any non-commercial, educational purpose there-after;
  8. The Producer encourages the Author to create and promote commercial, income-generating audio and visual recordings of their work and will make any material produced for the UN Day Festival freely available to the Author to assist them in that effort.
  9. The Producer reserves the right to re-record any song, statement or story for the UN Day Festival if, in their opinion, the recording made by the Author does not do justice to the quality of the composition and lyric;
  10. Submissions Format: Contributions can be in any language but must come with an English translation. All spoken word must be in video format; songs can be submitted as video or audio files, or as scores to be recorded by other artists – or by one of the Peace Child International house bands;
Responsibilities:
  • All partners must promote the Peace Child International Songs for Survival opportunity to their networks of young people and organisations, and support them to participate in whatever way they are able;
  • All partners must promote the Festival Programme in whatever media they have access to;
  • All partners must alert those in positions of power – in government and other sectors of society – to the Festival Programme and develop ways to support them first to watch it, and then to take action to partner with the youth on the delivery of the priority challenges and targets identified;

Privileges:

  • All partners may create their own versions of the Festival Programme to be distributed for non-commercial / educational use in territories where they operate;
  • All partners may put forward 4 x judges (2 over 40 / 2 under 40; 2 male / 2 female) to vote which songs are included in the international broadcast;
  • All partners will be listed with their logos and links to their websites on the Songs for Survival homepage which is designed to become the go-to site for students and teachers seeking up-to-the-minute data on the movement of key human, and planetary, survival indicators;

 

Schedule:
  • May 1 2021:                 Launch Event – Website open for Entries;
  • September 21 2021:       Deadline for Registration & Receipt of Completed Entries;
  • October 24 2021:           UN Day Festival – 30-minute 1st Year Proof of Concept Broadcast based on the

outline script which can be read here; also, we hope, that a pilot national version of the Festival will be broadcast in at least one country in 2021 – with many more nationally hosted versions to follow in subsequent years;