Being asked to serve as a reviewer for the Iris Prize process rather than as an applicant was one of the most unexpectedly meaningful professional experiences I have had in 2026. When Frances reached out, I accepted immediately. I did not fully realise how deeply this experience would change my perspective on grassroots environmental innovation, the essence of funding, and the quiet, remarkable efforts happening in communities that often go unnoticed. As I reviewed the applications, I was immediately struck by the wide variety of submissions. These were not polished proposals from well-funded, youth-led organisations with professional grant writers and communications teams. Many were raw, sincere, and intensely personal, created by people working at the crossroads of ecological crisis and community survival, often lacking access to the technical language that funding priorities usually focus on. Despite this, the ideas were exceptionally innovative, rooted in local contexts, and often more sophisticated in understanding system dynamics and social relationships than many I have encountered in my own community.
What moved me most was the recurring theme of integration, the recognition, held intuitively by so many applicants, that environmental problems and human problems are the same problem. Solutions that addressed the livelihoods and ecosystems crisis. Innovative conservation models built around the youth themselves. However, youth-led restoration initiatives treated ecological challenges and personal empowerment as inseparable. This is not how mainstream conservation has historically framed its work, and seeing it emerge so consistently from grassroots applicants felt genuinely significant to me. Reviewing also forced me into a kind of honest reckoning. I remembered what it felt like to be on the other side, the hours spent articulating something deeply personal into the structured language of an application, the vulnerability of putting your work and your community’s story in front of strangers, the weight of hoping that someone reading your words would understand not just what you were proposing but why the solution mattered. That memory sharpened my attention and deepened my care for nature. I tried to read every application as a person first, and an evaluator second, a person spending 5-10 hours every week and weekend.
I also came away with a renewed sense of frustration, a productive frustration at the structural gaps in environmental philanthropy and access to youth-led solutions. So many of the ideas I reviewed deserved significantly more than a seed grant. The funding landscape for grassroots environmental organisations, particularly those led by young people and women in the Global South, remains deeply inadequate relative to the scale and quality of the work being done. The Iris Prize is doing something genuinely important by creating a pathway that others do not. But the volume of compelling, underfunded work I encountered in this review process was a reminder that the pathway needs to be wider. I am grateful to Frances and the Iris Prize team for this invitation. Being a previous recipient made the experience personal. But it was the applicants themselves, their ideas, their honesty, their commitment that made it unforgettable.
