Mexico City, December 3, 2024—The pace of globalization threatens to exceed our capacity for tolerance. This is why we need cultural diplomacy: so that we may know one another before we fear one another.

For Giving Tuesday, I hope you will consider supporting Cultures in Harmony as we prepare for our 20th anniversary year in 2025! As we continue our journey down memory lane, we arrive to two of the projects that had the greatest impact: our 2013 return to Cameroon and our 2014 return to the Philippines. Check out the report from Cameroon, but for the Philippines the following year, let’s give the floor to our partners there:

“On behalf of the entire Cartwheel Family, we would like to take this opportunity to express our deepest gratitude to all of you who made this year’s joint effort a truly memorable one. It is not every day that we find a group of people whose vision for vulnerable communities is in perfect alignment with ours. And while we’ve heard of great stories about the previous joint projects between Cartwheel and CiH, the impact of this engagement on the Tagbanua musicians and communities exceeded our expectations as well. To the participating CiH musicians – Danielle, Rebecca, Kim and Frank – our endless thanks to you for sharing yourselves with the Tagbanua musicians and communities through your uplifting music! Not only are you talented, expert musicians whom the Tagbanua music-makers can look up to, but you also are truly beautiful human beings whose genuine desire to reach out to them allowed for a unique friendship to bloom and grow. We would like to share some of the videos from the learning exchange in Culion:

Part 1 – On Musical Ancestry

Part 2 – On the Learning Process

Part 3 – On Reflections of the Tagbanua musicians

We feel that the scenes and images depicted in the videos truly capture the essence of this collaboration—that is, the spirit of mutual sharing and collective action towards nurturing Indigenous Peoples’ heritage.”

Maria Johanna Pia G. Ortiz-Luis, Cartwheel Foundation

“What you guys in [Cultures in Harmony] are doing is not only helping us in the technical matters of how to make better music- but more than this, your activities and mission in CiH is also inspiring us to look deeper and dream bigger in our chosen life as artists-musicians, you are helping us find more meaning and more possibilities in how we as musicians can help in building a better world wherever we are.”

—Jeffrey Solares, Manila Symphony Orchestra

In 2025, we will return to the Philippines to work with the same partners there, and we will also initiate a new project in Congo, where we have a partner with whom we collaborated on a pandemic-era video about the challenges facing musicians there and a more recent project about what the EU can do in Africa.

Please help us continue bringing people together through music by supporting our 20th anniversary celebration today!