Blog

Announcing a leadership transition at Irise

After a decade of service, our founding CEO, Emily Wilson, is moving on to new adventures and it is time for the Irise community to choose their next CEO.

Irise was set-up to enable the voice and power of the people most held back by period inequality and injustice. Since day 1 our incredible team of staff, board, volunteers, local activists and donors have been working to build a resilient institution that could belong to and channel the leadership of these groups.

We always knew that a critical stepping stone on this journey would be enabling Irise to move beyond its founders. As we come to the end of our second five-year strategic cycle now is an opportunity for exciting change.

Over the last decade we have built and financed a global, grassroots community fighting for Period Equality for All. We have not only survived but thrived through a global pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis and significant cuts to UK aid spending.

Together we now host and support over 200 grassroots and community-based groups across the UK and East Africa, fighting for change in their own communities and advocating together nationally and globally.

Over the last decade we have directly supported over 100,000 young people and 287 organisations to end period poverty and shame.

We’ve achieved global recognition and awards for our trailblazing work on a forgotten but transformative gender equality issue.

As a global community, we have also built a shared understanding of how to build equal partnerships for global justice across geographical and cultural divides through embedding our institution in the principles of feminist leadership.

This exciting next step together will only add to our collective power to drive positive change.

“As we undertake this important transition, I want to thank Emily for her inspirational leadership over the last decade. Irise has created and inspired a movement to tackle period inequality and the much wider social injustices it covers. I look forward to working with my fellow trustees and the board at Irise Institute East Africa to guide the Irise group and wider community into a new decade of work even more exciting and impactful than the first.”

Linda Baines, Chair of the board at Irise International

Read a statement from our outgoing CEO, Emily Wilson, here.