International Resource for Impact and Storytelling

The International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS; fiscal sponsor: Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), in partnership with the Ford Foundation’s Moving Image Exploration and other donors, is building up an innovative, shared infrastructure to support, validate, and advance creative moving-image storytelling and narrative analysis approaches. The program aims to transform philanthropic use of the moving image to accelerate progress toward intersectional social justice goals; align civic, creative, and donor voices as they reinvigorate the civic imagination; and, through increasingly representative civically-engaged storytelling, channel social and material benefits and power back to story-source communities. The Compton Foundation’s support of IRIS is going toward the development of an artist leaders fellowship that aims to build social movements’ capacity for storytelling and cultural organizing by embedding artists in movement organizations.

Recent grant history