About us

Changing the way we view ourselves and the world one story at a time...

ISF is devoted to championing a sense of imagination, and to teaching stories – the kind of which are contained in the large published corpus of the writer and thinker, Idries Shah.

Engaged in a wide range of charitable projects on a world-wide basis, the Foundation seeks to stimulate the minds of both young and old by regarding the world in new ways.

In collaboration with UNESCO, ISF has begun a major story-writing competition for children in five languages and 180 countries. Other projects are working to give illustrated books to kids in Afghanistan and other conflict zones on a mass scale, thereby sparking the innate sense of imagination in young minds.

Yet another endeavour is striving to build the first global StoryBank – bridging disparate societies through stories – which we regard as the essence of all culture.