One of my favourite things about The Iris Project is the relationships we get to build with our Youth Advisors.
Our panel is made up of eight extraordinary young climate and environmental advocates and defenders from around the world. Some were once Iris Prize winners or runners-up themselves. Others have spent their teenage years and early twenties in UNFCCC negotiating rooms, or working tirelessly to protect their local environments and communities, finding ways for people and nature to thrive together, improving conditions locally and sharing what they learn far beyond their own communities.
One of my least favourite things about The Iris Project is that, every couple of years, we have to say goodbye to some of them.
Each Youth Advisor joins the panel for a minimum of two years and a maximum of three. Every year, we find ourselves wondering whether we can flex the rules to keep people for a little longer. But bringing new people onto the panel matters. It allows us to pair prize winners and runners-up with advisors who understand their region or area of work, bring in new perspectives that challenge us, and make sure our programmes continue to respond to what young environmental leaders actually need.
This year, we’re saying goodbye, at least from the panel, to Alicia Amancio and Sumarni Laman, who have accompanied The Iris Project for the past three years.
Over that time, Alicia and Sumarni have shaped so much of what we do. They’ve helped us refine the Prize process, rethink how we review applications and strengthen our eligibility criteria so that we continue to find an extraordinary and genuinely diverse group of young environmental leaders each year.
Just as importantly, they’ve provided our grantee partners with the kind of peer-to-peer mentorship that is hard to capture in a programme description, support that meets each project and person where they are. They’ve helped people navigate project challenges, fundraising and organisational growth, international climate conferences and the many less visible challenges that come with trying to build something from the ground up.
Sumarni is from Indonesia and has dedicated her life to advocating for the health of the forests of Kalimantan. She grew up surrounded by rainforest, animals and birds, and has had to watch as much of the forest around her has been destroyed by oil palm plantations. Sumarni has brought an important Indigenous perspective and depth of knowledge to The Iris Project, approaching every discussion, relationship and decision with patience, thoughtfulness and care.
She has been an incredible mentor to Dipta, founder of LIQUIFY, even travelling to Bali to spend time with him and his team in person. Over the past few years, she has supported Dipta as LIQUIFY has grown from a project started at school into an established, legally registered non-profit organisation.
She has also mentored Gustavo and the Uru Uru Team, an Indigenous-led, youth-led organisation restoring the heavily polluted Uru Uru wetlands in Bolivia. Sumarni brought to that relationship her own experience of protecting ecosystems deeply intertwined with community, culture and identity offering not just practical guidance, but the perspective of someone who understands what it means to defend a place you are deeply connected to.
This year…
“Sumarni was our Iris Project Adviser, but we also saw her as our “Ate” or sister. She was always there to listen and understand our struggles, making us feel that what we were going through as leaders in our community was valid. She is a brilliant and inspiring leader, and you can really feel her passion for human and ecological justice. From her, we learned that conservation is also about people. Because what is the point of saving nature if we leave behind the people who have always called it home?” – Diofel Tampoy, Project Lawud
Alicia is from Brazil and has been working in climate policy since she was 17. She is a UNFCCC expert who has spent much of her twenties in climate negotiation rooms, and is also the founder of the Latin American Youth Climate Scholarship.
Alicia has brought to The Iris Project a rare combination of expertise in international climate policy, racial justice and youth organising. She is also one of the most transparent people I know. Over the last three years she has shared her knowledge incredibly generously – with our team, with the wider panel and with the projects she has mentored – across strategy, partnerships, fundraising and navigating international climate spaces.
She has been a brilliant co-mentor with Sumarni to Gustavo and his team, including supporting them as they prepared for and attended their first UN climate conference, COP30 in Brazil, last year. She also guided our Seed Prize winners, Project Mila in Mombasa, Kenya, who are tackling local waste while creating useful resources for their community through an innovative circular economy model, as they worked to turn an idea into a fully operational organisation. And this year, she has also mentored three of our runner-up projects, helping us test how we can extend meaningful accompaniment beyond our Prize winners.
Thankfully, this isn’t really goodbye to Alicia. She is stepping away from the Youth Advisory Panel and into a new role within The Iris Project team as our Strategic Platform and Movement Manager. She’ll be helping us take what we’ve learnt through the Prize and the Youth Funding Toolkit and make it useful to many more young environmental leaders – facilitating capacity-strengthening sessions, helping us grow our movement-building work, and strengthening the way we engage with and influence funders.
“Querida Alicia, thank you so much for have been an AMAZING mentor this last time. You making the effort to not only come observe our work but also collaborate us, get your hands dirty and even more important, believe on us to scale is a few if the actions that make us very grateful to you. We’re sad other project won’t get this amazing mentoring but more than happy we are ing to stay connected through the Iris project. And really hoping to welcome you back to Oruro very soon! OBRIGADO, dear Alicia!” – Gustavo Blanco, The Uru Uru Team
It feels like a very natural next chapter: taking three years of experience challenging and shaping The Iris Project from the Youth Advisory Panel and bringing that perspective even more deeply into the organisation.
Alicia and Sumarni, thank you for the extraordinary amount of time, wisdom, love and care you have shared with us, with our grantee partners and with the wider The Iris Project community.
You have shaped The Iris Project in ways that will last long beyond your time on the panel and we are enormously grateful.
– Millie Edwards, Director of The Iris Project
