Turning live events into platforms for real impact
We connect audiences, communities, and place through strategies and partnerships that generate long-term value.
About
Sustainability on Stage works at the intersection of live culture, community, and sustainability.
Live events have become key spaces for connection, belonging, and collective experience. There is a clear opportunity to rethink how these experiences are designed — not only as moments that happen in a place, but as experiences that engage with it and create value over time.
We design cultural experiences that extend beyond the event, connecting audiences with local ecosystems and integrating community networks.
This approach embeds sustainability into structures, relationships, and practices, generating continuity and local impact.
Based in Córdoba, Argentina, our work is grounded in the Latin American context. In this region, a significant part of the social and community-based economy operates outside the cultural industry. Drawing from emerging practices in the global live music sector, we bring these approaches into different contexts through a perspective shaped by this context.
We integrate social and community-based economic actors alongside organizations, the public sector, companies, and civil society to expand participation, strengthen networks, and create local impact.
Led by LucÃa Reches, a geographer working at the intersection of culture, community, and sustainability.
THE GAP
In Latin America, strong community, cultural, and local processes are already in motion.At the same time, there are shared challenges:
Informality across local economies
Limited structures for measurement and visibility
Gaps between community processes and decision-making spaces
Lack of integration with the live event industry
As a result, meaningful impact is already happening, but those efforts are often fragmented and not fully connected.
Sustainability on Stage works within this space.We build on what’s already happening on the ground, designing systems that help make impact:visible, measurable, and applicable to live experiences.
WHAT WE DO
STRATEGY
Design frameworks that transform events into experiences with continuity, engagement, and impact.
LOCAL INTEGRATION
Connect cultural experiences with communities, networks, and local economies.
PARTNERSHIPS & COLLABORATION
Develop relationships between organizations, the public sector, companies, and cultural actors.
programs & initiatives
Implement initiatives that activate audiences and generate continuity over time.
IN PRACTICE
Understanding each event through its local context and community dynamics
Defining sustainability strategies integrated into production
Designing audience experiences and on-site participation
Building local partnerships and impact-driven programs
Connecting events with local community initiatives
WHO WE WORK WITH
Tours and live productions
Festivals and venues
Artists and creative teams
Brands and sponsors
Cultural organizations, public sector and non-profits
Our Work
Our work is developed in collaboration with local actors across different contexts. In Córdoba, Argentina, we work with Fundación Vicentina↗, an organization with over 15 years of experience supporting community-based social development.
GRASSROOTS SYSTEMS
We support community-building processes in Córdoba, where impact is sustained through relationships, participation, and place-based integration.Understanding how impact is built before designing it.
Climate Week Córdoba
In dialogue with global initiatives such as Los Angeles Climate Week, this initiative brings together organizations, the public sector, companies, artists, civil society, and community networks within a shared territorial context.Building on what’s already happening on the ground.
lucia reches peressotti
Sustainability on Stage is led by LucÃa Reches Peressotti, a strategist working at the intersection of culture, community, and social change.
Her work is grounded in a place-based perspective, designing strategies and processes that support cultural projects, events, and organizations in moving from sustainability commitments to concrete, long-term action.
She approaches sustainability as a systemic challenge, working across actors, governance structures, and forms of collaboration.
Rooted in Latin American contexts, her work connects local realities with broader conversations around culture and sustainability.
LucÃa works bringing a territorial perspective to the design of cultural platforms and impact-driven processes.
INSIGHTS
Where are young people today?
Where meaning and community take shape today.
From cultural events to territorial platforms
Rethinking cultural impact through community, territory, and the long term.
Impact is designed within live experiences
Sustainability works when it is embedded in the experience, not added to it.
When the message is not enough
From positioning to designing impact through live experiences
Real impact in live experiences is built through design.
Sustainability on Stage
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Where are young people today?
On where meaning, community and action are actually taking shape today.
Over the past decades, traditional institutions have been losing their ability to represent and engage younger generations. As Rossana Reguillo suggests, this disaffection does not necessarily imply apathy or a lack of interest, but rather a loss of meaning and representation within those structures.
When this happens, forms of connection, organization, and action do not disappear — they shift. So where are young people being represented today? In which spaces are they building identity and a sense of belonging?
A significant part of meaning-making, community-building, and collective action seems to be taking place elsewhere. Our hypothesis is that many of these spaces today are cultural:
Festivals, music scenes, organized fandoms, artistic collectives, and digital communities are not only sites of expression; they can also operate as spaces where forms of collective identity, belonging, and social action are articulated.
Art and culture have historically been spaces where societies reflect on themselves and imagine possible futures. In today’s global context, they are once again taking on a central role — not only because of what they express, but because of their capacity to convene and generate community.
On global stages, this is becoming visible in different ways: artists’ interventions in large-scale events, communities that sustain action over time, and production models that are beginning to incorporate broader dimensions of impact all suggest that what culture enables can go beyond the message itself.
It is at this intersection between culture and community that a question begins to emerge — one that is not only cultural, but also strategic:
if this is where meaning and community are being built, what does it mean to start designing cultural experiences from that point?
From cultural events to territorial platforms
On rethinking cultural impact through community, territory and the long term
Not all artists, festivals, or productions that engage with social issues do so from the same place.
In some cases, this engagement remains at the level of messaging. In others, it begins to take shape as a more sustained process, where what is at stake is not only what is communicated, but the community that is built and what remains over time.
In this sense, cultural events can begin to be understood not only as moments, but as platforms — spaces where actors, territories, industries, and communities are articulated over time.
However, this dynamic does not unfold in the same way across contexts.
In Latin America — and particularly in Argentina — the starting point is different. There are existing networks, local economies, and forms of community organization with deep and heterogeneous histories. At the same time, many of these dynamics are not fully integrated into the cultural industry or into live event circuits.
In practice, this creates a tension for the industry: there is culture, there is community, and there are ongoing experiences that reveal the potential of the territory — but that potential does not always translate into processes that can be articulated, scaled, or sustained over time.
In this context, the challenge is not to start from zero, but to work with what already exists: to recognize these networks, integrate them into the logic of the industry, and design how they can operate as platforms capable of building community over time.
From there, the question is: how do we build community from the Global South through culture and live experiences?
Impact is designed within live experiences
Sustainability becomes meaningful when it is integrated into the experience through design and planning.
In recent years, sustainability has become increasingly visible in the live music industry. From reusable materials to environmental messaging, the topic is present across many concerts and tours. However, its impact is not always the same.
In many cases, the difference does not lie in the message itself, but in how it is integrated into the experience.
For many audiences — especially younger ones — issues such as environmental responsibility, mental health, gender and social issues are not external topics, but part of how they see the world. In that sense, the challenge is not to generate interest, but to translate these concerns into concrete forms of participation.
Live events offer a unique context for this. They are not only performances, but collective experiences where attention, emotion, and identification come together. It is within this setting that certain proposals can take on a different meaning.
When sustainability appears as an added message, it risks being perceived as external or superficial. When it is integrated into the design of the experience, it becomes part of how the event is built and lived.
Recent experiences show that this can take different forms. From production decisions to partnerships with organizations or the activation of communities, what changes is not only the content, but the logic of the experience itself.
Recent Billie Eilish tour offer a clear example. Rather than relying solely on awareness campaigns, sustainability is embedded into the concert ecosystem — from production decisions to audience interaction, and through partnerships with organizations like REVERB that connect each show with local actors. Initiatives like Support + Feed invite fans to take small, accessible actions within the context of the event, turning abstract commitments into situated forms of participation.
In these cases, participation does not happen separately, but as part of the event. It is not only about what is communicated, but about what is enabled.
From an industry perspective, this implies a shift in approach. Sustainability moves from being an added layer to becoming a dimension embedded in the design.
At that point, events begin to function as spaces where certain practices can be tested, shared, and potentially sustained over time.
The question, then, is not whether to include sustainability, but how to design it as part of the experience.
When the message is not enough
From positioning to designing impact through live experiences
In recent years, more and more artists have engaged with social and environmental agendas. But not all of them do it in the same way. And not all of them generate the same kind of impact.
In some cases, that positioning translates into visibility: a statement is made, a narrative is built, a message is amplified. In others, the scope goes further: active communities are built and processes are sustained over time.
For example, Billie Eilish’s case helps illustrate a different approach.Her work with REVERB and Support+Feed goes beyond amplifying a cause. Throughout Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour, sustainability is not an add-on — it is embedded into the design of the tour itself.
It is integrated into production, audience experience and the territories where the shows take place: waste reduction, refill stations, plant-based food options, participatory activations, climate funds and partnerships with local organizations in each city.
That’s where the difference lies.
Impact does not depend only on what is said on stage. It is built from the moment the experience is designed.
According to the tour’s sustainability report ↗, more than 70% of a concert’s carbon footprint comes from the audience itself — making the design of the fan experience central.
In this way, the tour stops being just an event and starts functioning as a platform.
What’s interesting is that this logic does not stay anchored in one place. It travels.From Oceania to Europe, from North America to Asia, the same structure adapts and activates within each territory.
So why does this matter?
Because we know this model already works across different contexts. But it has not yet unfolded in Latin America.
What would happen if this model arrived in Latin America?
At first glance, we might assume the model is replicable. But it isn’t — at least not in the same way. Because in Latin America, the conditions are different.
Sustainability in live events is not only about production decisions. It intersects with structural conditions: informality, inequality, infrastructure limitations and cost pressures.
According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and other international organizations, a large part of the region’s economies operate within high levels of informality and limited investment capacity to sustain long-term transitions.
This is not just context. It is the system in which the music industry operates and where live events take place.
And this has major implications. When a concert arrives in cities like Buenos Aires, Bogotá or Mexico City, it enters a different kind of structure — one shaped by distinct social, economic and cultural dynamics.
Popular economies, neighborhood networks, informal circuits, forms of exchange that are not integrated into the cultural industry — but are part of the place itself. This is often perceived as noise.But it isn’t. It is territory.
So the question changes. It is not about transferring a global model. It is about designing it within contexts where the logic is different.
Where sustainability cannot be approached only through international standards,
but through systems where community, culture and economy are already intertwined.
Because in this region, what is missing is not community.Not culture.
Not experience.What’s missing is structure.
So how should this be designed in our region? It starts by reading the territory.Thinking of the event as a platform means working with what already exists:
Articulating with local organizations
Integrating networks from the social and cooperative economy
Designing the experience from real conditions: mobility, food, waste
Building continuity beyond the show
From there, the work is not about adding actions, but about designing how these elements become part of the experience itself.
Because impact does not end when the curtain falls.It is sustained within the territory.
Grassroots systems
Understanding how impact is built before desigining it.
Across different community processes in Argentina, we’ve been observing how local networks, relationships and informal systems sustain participation, care and continuity over time.From neighborhood organizations to cultural initiatives, these systems already operate as active social infrastructures.Our work focuses on understanding how they function, what sustains them, and how they can be translated into frameworks for impact design.We see these communities as living systems shaped by relationships, participation, and local culture.
Our Role
Read the territory
Understand what keeps communities active over time.
Understand patterns of participation and continuity
Turn local insights into impact strategies.
Live experiences create stronger communities when they build on existing local networks.Meaningful impact starts with understanding local communities first.
This work lays the foundation for designing territorial impact strategies for live experiences.
CLIMATE WEEK CORDOBA
Connecting culture, climate justice and community.
An initiative currently being co-created with local and international partners.It aims to activate climate action through cultural experiences and local engagement.Rather than isolated events, Climate Week is designed as a platform:
Connecting actors
Activating local ecosystems
Create long-term value for local communities.
The goal is to connect culture and climate through local communities, active participation, and long-term impact.
We are building it together.