A joint initiative by Skoll Foundation, Ford Foundation and Doc Society, Flex Fund supports innovative and creative projects emerging from partnerships between moving image storytellers and social entrepreneurs.
Flex Fund grants are only available to joint Skoll Foundation and Ford Foundation grantees, all of whom are ground-breaking global leaders in social entrepreneurship working on a spectrum of crucial areas - from sustainability to anti-corruption to African land rights and beyond. This funding will enable teams to go further, deepen impact and/or explore bold new ideas in a nimble and bespoke way.
2017 Flex Fund grantees:
Crisis Action's impact strategy will aim to ensure that Aleppo's fate is not repeated across Syria. It will do this by using the Sundance award-winning documentary film, The Last Men In Aleppo, to build US support for newly-proposed no-fighting zones where civilians can escape attacks, as well as educating hundreds of newly-elected MPs across Europe about Aleppo and the power they have to prevent it from happening again.
Health Care Without Harm are deploying a short animation that will inspire doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals worldwide to recognize their moral mandate to respond to climate change, a medical emergency. Using film, the aim is to weave together a comprehensive storytelling strategy that will increase our ability to inspire action toward reversing the climate crisis.
Health Leads are launching a 20 min. documentary made by filmmaker Nicole Newnham and a dynamic US-based outreach campaign later this year. The organisation envisions a healthcare system that addresses all patients’ basic resource needs as a standard of quality care and empowers medical practitioners to screen for unmet needs—like housing, employment, and food—and connect patients to community resources (regranted from 2016).
KickStart International, a non-profit social enterprise lifting farmers in Africa out of poverty, worked with director, Topaz Adizes, to create: A Seed of Maize. Shot in Zambia, the documentary film explores poverty, health, and girls’ education—against the backdrop of tradition, community, and family. KickStart will leverage it to promote small-scale irrigation through a forum targeting Kenya-based policy makers and other NGOs.
Search For Common Ground will work with Redbird Productions to improve attitudes toward women’s empowerment in Moroccan communities through screenings and dialogues around the documentary Casablanca Calling. The film follows a new generation of women working as Morchidat, official Muslim leaders who are empowering women in their communities by supporting them in pursuing their education, managing family relationships, and ultimately pursuing peaceful social change within an Islamic framework.
Witness’ Mobil-Eyes Us uses live-streamed video storytelling plus task-routing technology to connect the right "distant witnesses" - people who care about the struggles of communities facing rights violations but may not be physically present - to meaningful experience and action. Initially, the project will focus on telling (and changing) stories from Brazil's urban favelas, where solidarity and pressure can make all the difference.
2016 Flex Fund grantees:
Forest Trends are collaborating with leading Latin American chefs and conservationists in a pan-Amazonian food movement, Cumari: Rainforest to Table. Gastronomy provides an exciting new way to value the world´s largest tropical forest and benefit local communities, improving local nutrition and fostering new enterprises based on saving, not felling, the rainforest.
Health Leads are launching a 20 min. documentary made by filmmaker Nicole Newnham and a dynamic US-based outreach campaign later this year. The organisation envisions a healthcare system that addresses all patients’ basic resource needs as a standard of quality care and empowers medical practitioners to screen for unmet needs—like housing, employment, and food—and connect patients to community resources.
Imazon are working on a long-form narrative film with filmmaker Estevão Ciavatta/ Pindorama Filmes and creating an accompanying outreach campaign to save the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.