The Washington-based Skoll Foundation invests in social entrepreneurs and other social innovators around the world. Louise Marra, CSI associate and board member of the international Collective Change Lab has been a panellist and keynote speaker at Skoll Foundation annual world forums. We asked Louise about these world-leading gatherings for social entrepreneurs, innovators, funders, policymakers.
Louise what’s it like attending a Skoll World Forum?
The annual forum is a gathering place for people looking at emerging practice. It's an extraordinary experience. The foundation invites social entrepreneurs from around the world, and a lot of philanthropic organisations as well. Skoll understands the importance of ‘fabric making, because a lot of social entrepreneurs get so isolated or philanthropy as well. So they bring people together for the week and they are able to make connections. It makes me think of the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's comment from his studies of complex systems, that small pockets of clarity and connection can elevate the entire system to a higher order.
And this year the forum was in Oxford, the seat of intellect, so a place where people can be very playful, curious and exploratory.
At this year’s forum, what emerging thinking and practice were of special interest?
The work we've done at the Collective Change Lab, on healing-centred systems change, is unique and emerging. There was lots of interest in that. And of course our Haumanu framework as an approach to restorative systems change draws on that work. And people are always interested in scale, that's something people are trying to find ways to do scale without sacrificing depth or connection, because we can't just pick up something that works here and pop it down in another country, another cultural context. But at Skoll the social entrepreneurs and creators get informed by things like bringing healing into systems change, and then they find their own way to do it.
AI was quite a big thing at this years’ forum, and there are amazing people in Africa who are looking at large language models like Claude or ChatGPT, which miss out whole paradigms because they’re not built to understand different languages. So they're trying to create different models of doing AI in African countries.
Then you meet amazing people like Sanjay Purohit from the Centre for Exponential Change. He was a panellist on digital access, AI, and inclusive growth, looking at how global platforms, EdTech, and locally-owned digital ecosystems can scale to benefit marginalised communities.
There is a Skoll ‘fringe festival’ – what is that about?
Yes! The forum is by invitation only, but during forum week they offered two free open events in Oxford which a couple of thousand people attended. Marmalade is available for forum delegates and their organisations to host their own events as part of a wider ecosystem, and Sidebar is a crowd-sourced space running alongside the Forum with self-organised discussion groups. It also offers digital ‘People and Event Maps’ to increase visibility and participation among everyone present during the week. The annual Skoll Awards for Social Innovation are also announced during the week.
Skoll Awards for Social Innovation 2026
Want to know more about outstanding international social innovation? The stories of the Skoll awardees are a good place to start. The awardees for 2026 are three organisations ‘driving measurable progress on child health in Pakistan, early learning and development in South Africa, and civic technology and public benefits access in India.” If you’re looking for some inspiration, you will find it in the ChildLife Foundation, SmartStart, and Indus Action.
Why the Skoll World Forum is a worthy quest for Australian funders
A perspective on Skoll from Philanthropy Australia chair Darrell Wade. Darrell also chairs the Intrepid Foundation and the Dawn Wade Foundation.