Just around the corner, on April 13-15th, the Skoll Foundation will host its 18th annual Skoll World Forum, and for the second year in a row, it will take place not within the halls and theaters of Oxford, England but on thousands of small screens across the globe. Jess Fleuti, who has led programming for six years as the Director and Curator of Convenings at Skoll, recently took a short break from her frenzied work leading up to the event to reflect on this year’s theme and on how this convening quickly evolved in response to the demands and opportunities of virtual connection. Jess also offered thoughts on the big lessons that helped reshape the design process with a goal of shifting power and influence to those most proximate to pressing global challenges.
Zach Slobig: Talk to me about this year’s theme, Closing the Distance. That phrase resonates on so many levels given the events of the past year. How did the theme help you and your team design this year’s Forum and inform your curation of sessions and events?
Jess Fleuti: First, there’s the physical distance that most of us around the world have had to maintain from our family, friends, and colleagues over the last year. As someone who works in the space of connecting and convening people, that’s been tough. Through these virtual platforms we can connect people and close that distance, if not in a literal way, in a human one. The theme also speaks to closing the distance in the inequities that this crisis has made so much more evident. Ultimately, it’s about closing the distance between the challenges the world faces and the solutions that we know exist.
With our thinking around the Forum, we looked for ways to question the orthodoxies around power in our sector and open that discussion about how each of us share power, wield power, hoard power, and shift power.
The Forum has historically played a role of connecting social innovators to each other, and with potential partners, collaborators, and funders. Traditionally this event is tightly curated by a small crew in Palo Alto, California. Leaning into the idea of closing the distance, we put a call out to our network to submit ideas for session and speakers. We had an overwhelming response of more 540 submissions from more than 400 organizations. That really blew us away.
Zach: Reflect on the last year’s Forum—the first convening that Skoll conducted entirely in a virtual space. What were some of the biggest lessons coming out of that experience that informed the approach this year?
Jess: Last year we were, I think, one of the first “cancelled” big global events where people would have come from a hundred countries into a single place. So, we were left with only three weeks to plan something virtual. We knew that we couldn’t do that alone. We opened it up to the community and in short time we had 140 different sessions, which were held on every platform imaginable at every time of day. We ended up having more than 10,000 people participate and were amazed at just how high quality and engaging the conversations were.
It was also a bit chaotic. There wasn’t really a central platform for people to connect and find each other and that’s why people come to the Forum. Coming into this year, that was a goal: how do we make this virtual space a better place for making those kinds of connections? This year we are conducting the Forum on a platform called Hopin that allows us to have a decentralized, community-driven program, but with central places and opportunities to connect with people.
Zach: You and Claire Wathen, Skoll’s Director of Networks and Partnerships, have talked about the inclusivity and democratizing of the Forum that came to pass last year. Are there specific ways that we’ve built on that element of inclusivity and democratizing this year?
Jess: Last year’s pivot on a dime built on four years of what we called “ecosystem events” that we had been unleashing on the town of Oxford. We had an inkling of all the side meetings and events convened by partners and others who may or may not even be attending the Forum themselves, so we built an infrastructure to support and encourage that.
This year, we enlisted a group of 18 people—each with large and engaged networks—from 13 different nations as a global advisory group and gave them the difficult task of the initial review of those 540 sessions so that they could elevate the topics and issues that they found most resonant. This is part of our efforts to shift power and influence outside of the headquarters of the Skoll Foundation to the broader network, to ensure that the Forum has the highest degree of relevancy. At the end of the day, the program this year reflects the valuable co-creation process from this group:
Michelle Arevalo Carpenter, CEO | IMPAQTO| Ecuador
Marcel Fukayama, Executive Director |Sistema B| Brazil
Daniel Buchbinder, Founder/Executive Director |Alterna| Guatemala
Priya Ajmera, CEO AIC N/CORE |The Nudge| India
Preethi Herman, Global Executive Director |Change.org Foundation| India
Deval Sanghavi, Co-Founder |Dasra |India
Jackie Chimhanzi, CEO |African Leadership Institute| South Africa
Marion Ntiru, Program Manager |ELMA| South Africa/Uganda/U.S.
Deepali Khanna, Managing Director of Asia |Rockefeller Foundation| Thailand
Yanni Peng, CEO | Narada Foundation| China
Hibbaq Osman, CEO and Founder | KARAMA| Egypt
Fenella Kernebone, Head of Curation |TEDxSydney| Australia
Peter Drobac, Director |Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship| UK
Laura Weidman Powers, Head of Impact |Echoing Green |U.S.
Karabi Acharya, Director, Global Ideas for US Solutions |Robert Wood Johnson Foundation| U.S.
Mosun Layode, Executive Director |Africa Philanthropy Forum| South Africa
Eugene Amusin, Senior Vice President |Citi Inclusive Finance| UK
Crystal Echo Hawk, Executive Director |Illuminative| U.S./Pawnee
It made it more clear to me just how much in the past maybe five years the Forum, the program has reflected my own interests and curiosities in the field. One concrete example is there was more interest this year in specific, concrete partnerships and projects where people wanted to go deep on a specific program that was happening in say the Yucatan Peninsula, where I would typically tend to curate for a session that’s a bit more focused on the meta questions about the sector.
Another thing that’s different about the program this year is that more than half of the sessions are focused on the five named strategic priority issue areas of the Foundation: health and pandemics, inclusive economies, climate, effective governance, and racial justice.
Zach: And what most excited you about the plenary events that you’ve curated this year?
Jess: Well, it turns out that it’s much easier for people to say ‘yes’ when we can come to them, than it is to fly to England for a week. So, we were able to finally land some speakers that we’ve been talking to for years about coming to the Forum.
The plenaries in New Theatre in Oxford always include an element of celebration and performance. We wanted to bring that into the virtual space as well, so there will be awesome performances and an engaging program for both opening and closing plenary to book endthe event.
Zach: To take a step back and reflect on the big picture for a moment, how might this embracing of a virtual mode of convening—with all its opportunity for inclusion and democratization—fundamentally redesign how, when, and where Skoll brings people together going forward?
Jess: Virtual events and in-person events are totally different animals and they each have pros and cons. I think we’re all looking forward to getting back to connecting in-person, and we recognize that these virtual events offer a level of accessibility that we could never achieve from within the Saïd Business School building in Oxford. That’s a good thing.
We’ll continue to explore what hybrid in-person/ virtual events may look like. We’re also exploring what it might look like to have smaller regional convenings, either aligned to the Forum or that are independent.
I think the future will be about selecting which one is fit for purpose and what makes sense based on the goals that any given group might have. The Forum has been such big, public-facing flagship event, and the last year I think has reinforced for me why providing the ‘container’ is useful. Skoll has a unique role in carving out that space and connecting the dots, especially between different centers of power, and as a “glue” across a myriad of social and environmental impact efforts
I think the whole field will be exploring new ways to activate people that isn’t always a ‘conference’. Beyond just setting the table, and deciding how that table looks, we have a responsibility to put the menu design right in the hands of the people who will share that meal. That’s exciting.
The 2021 Skoll World Forum is free and open to all. We hope you can join us. Register here
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