Expect the Unexpected: Building in Plan B
Speakers
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Co-Founder, Grain Media
2014 saw the completion of Orlando’s debut feature length documentary, Virunga, executively produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, and its global release as a Netflix Original production. Winning 27 International awards, it is the perfect showcase of his ability as a compelling storyteller with an cinematic eye for striking images and a nose for far reaching investigations.
Having previously directed award-winning films, spanning Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Arctic, and covering all manner of stories from a skateboard school in Afghanistan through to the tracking and arrest of pirates in West Africa, it’s no exaggeration to say that Orlando is one of the world’s leading young documentarians with a bright future ahead of him. He has been particularly lauded for his ability to draw out intimate personal stories and combine them with an eye for striking visual aesthetics.
He has been nominated for an Academy Award Award, a BAFTA, a Director’s Guild of America Award, a Producer’s Guild of America Award, an Independent Film Spirt Award, a Royal Television Society Award and has won over 40 other international film awards to date.
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A former screenwriter and independent filmmaker, Jenny Bowen founded Half the Sky (now OneSky for all children) in 1998 in order to give something back to China, her adopted daughters’ home country, and to the many orphaned children then languishing behind institutional walls. Under her leadership, OneSky has grown into a global NGO; its mission is to train communities and caregivers to provide nurturing care and early education that unlocks the potential in our world’s most vulnerable young children. OneSky now works in Mainland China, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Hong Kong.
Among other awards, Jenny has been honored with the Skoll Award, AmCham Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Nonprofit Leader of the Year, and the Purpose Prize. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes inaugural 50 Women over 50 who are leading the way in Impact. She is author of the memoir, Wish You Happy Forever: What China’s Orphans Taught Me About Moving Mountains, published by Harper Collins.
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Co-Founder & CEO, Solutions Journalism Network
David is CEO and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), which is leading a global movement to transform journalism, anchored by a focus on spreading knowledge through rigorous reporting about potential or demonstrated solutions to global problems. SJN has directly engaged with > 650 news organizations and 47,000 journalists and now has hundreds of training partners in 50 countries. As a journalist, David examined social innovation efforts for three decades. He created and co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times, which ran for 11 years and published over 600 articles about social innovators. He is the author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank, and Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.
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Founding Director, International Resource for Impact and Storytelling
An award-winning independent media field builder, Cara is Founding Director of the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS), a donor collaborative supporting creative visual storytelling and narrative analysis in the public interest. IRIS is a grantee partner of Skoll Foundation. Cara served at Ford Foundation as Director, JustFilms, piloting a network-focused, narrative-informed, cultural grantmaking strategy which was integrated across Ford’s ten regions and global strategies. She was Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, funding dozens of non-fiction films, co-founded Doc Society’s Good Pitch event and training model and created the Stories of Change initiative with the Skoll Foundation. Cara has received multiple Emmy Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, and duPont-Columbia Awards.She received a Webby Award for creating P.O.V.’s Borders, a pioneering web series on PBS. She is a member of AMPAS and the WGA and lives in New Jersey, USA.
