RiseWorks
Impact. Captured. Amplified.
RiseWorks is a public benefit corporation building visual storytelling infrastructure for the mission economy — the nonprofits, foundations, and purpose-led organizations whose work depends on attention. Funding follows attention. Volunteers follow stories. Policy follows narrative.
Hiberry Lane's founder built it hands-on: the company, the product, and the engineering behind it. What follows is the build — the platform, the architecture, and the thesis it runs on.
“Storytelling is infrastructure. Build the system once, and every story made on it makes the next one better.”
StoryOS — the platform
A multi-tenant storytelling operating system on a 3.0 chassis, built ground-up: per-tenant isolation, a Story modeled as a first-class entity moving through a nine-state narrative machine, and a suggest-and-approve layer where humans decide every consumer-facing change and the system remembers the decision.
Production management, story graph, donor theaters, storyboards, and a legal-template engine run inside one system of record. An MCP surface and an OAuth-secured API open the platform to integration. CRM connectors close the loop from a published story back to the donation or outcome it drove.
Archive intelligence
Mission organizations sit on decades of footage they can't search. StoryMine ingests an archive, understands it at the frame and transcript level, and surfaces the editor-ready clips inside it — turning a dormant media library into a working source of stories.
The ingest stack pairs video-understanding and transcription models with embeddings and a rough-cut engine, instrumented from the first job: time to first found story, clips per terabyte, editor hours saved.
The closed loop
Every story carries provenance from ideation through brief, production, distribution, and impact signal. Three nested loops — production, platform, intelligence — feed a story-performance graph that learns what narrative shapes work, for which audience, on which channel.
The discipline is deliberate. The system improves without modifying itself: no auto-mutation, human approval on every narrative surface, a consent ledger on every asset. Authenticity is technical here — no AI-generated visuals, no fabrication.
RiseWorks Local — the creator-owner network
An expansion architecture that turns independent local creators into chapter owners. Each chapter runs its entire operation on the platform — production, client portal, contracts, invoicing, payouts — while the network handles matching, compliance, and the payments rail.
The model gives the people who tell a community's stories ownership of the telling, and gives the network an economics dataset that exists nowhere else: what stories cost, what clients pay, what creators earn, by market.
The model has a history. The Farm Security Administration sent photographers to document American communities in the 1930s. The Missouri Photo Workshop carried the craft forward. The Good Miami Project delivered 50,000-plus images to more than sixty Miami-Dade nonprofits. RiseWorks extends that line and puts the creators from the neighborhoods these organizations serve into ownership of the storytelling.