IRIS’ Partnership with Skoll Foundation
Building Narrative Infrastructure
The Skoll Foundation is a founding donor of the International Resource for Impact & Storytelling (IRIS), launched in 2021. With Skoll’s crucial support and partnership, IRIS has been defining its methodology and has created activities that strengthen narrative infrastructure internationally.
IRIS is now architecting narrative and story-for-impact networks that bring storytellers, changemakers and innovators into new collaborations which build narrative and storytelling capacity to address our most pressing challenges.
IRIS convenes, curates, connects, commissions and supports storytelling content that advances the issues our donors care about.
IRIS focuses on three principles
This spiral represents IRIS’ way of working — layering activities over time and expanding our networks in regions around the world.
Strengthening Ecosystems to Stimulate Systems Change
IRIS believes that working in narrative networks rather than in isolation can make a significant, systems-level impact. These alliances require trust, time to develop, nimbleness, contextual knowledge and creativity. IRIS connects activities across its projects to form a steadily expanding set of narrative and storytelling resources.
Local Resonance with Global Reach
By moving resources to local community-based organizations and leaders, IRIS helps to build bridges between lived experience and mainstream cultural influence.
Confluence
Confluence is IRIS’ signature program providing convenings, a year-round WhatsApp community, case studies and resources and growing connections between civic leadership and storytelling and narrative expertise.
The Narrative Change Hub
The 2026 relaunch of the Narrative Directory and the Narrative Change Hub transforms diverse insights into a permanent, accessible global infrastructure. Coupled with high-level academic research and the broader Commons Library, this outcome contributes to a knowledge platform for the ecosystem. We are moving the field away from anecdotal success and toward a rigorous, data-informed practice where practitioners can find both the inspiration and the concrete tools needed to measure and execute deep narrative shifts.
Catalyzing Impact in the Field
Sunshine Cinema
Funding supported their project building a solar-powered mobile film screening model to promote conservation and community engagement in Southern Africa, and supported Sunshine representatives to participate in major global film industry events, facilitating collaborations and expanding their impact on a worldwide scale.
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