In this guest blog, Hope Mills Voelkel, reflects on the power of storytelling in the face of political backlash against aid and funding cuts. She argues that communicators must rise to the challenge, innovate, take risks, connect, and fight for the narratives that matter.

Earlier this year, when Elon Musk announced he was feeding USAID to the woodchipper, I kept seeing a woman’s face lit up with a grin as she showed me her recently installed in-home latrine in Rwanda’s Nyanza District. She was part of a Village Saving and Loan Association that worked with a USAID-funded program to increase access to hygiene and sanitation products and services. In her mid-70s, she was proud of the toilet that was now easy and hygienic for her to access. It was the first she’d had.

Her smile is what came to me over and over in the weeks that USAID and its programs were cut. I was painfully aware that the average American would better know inaccurate data and lies related to USAID’s work more so than her face and the millions of others who were saved from AIDS or malaria or natural disasters as a result of USAID-backed programs.

We are living in a world battling for stories

As Hannah Arendt wrote, in articulating the ideal subjects for totalitarian rule, it “is not the convinced Nazi…but the people for whom the distinction between faction and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

I would be naive (and plain wrong) to think communications can save the aid and development worlds and all the current funding issues, but I am more and more convinced that those of us in communications do have a strong role to play.

Lots of incredibly smart people are writing about how things have fallen apart and why. One communications-oriented perspective that I agree with is how aid and programs have fallen into their own jargony dialect that makes their impact difficult to fully understand. The language can be academic with lots of words, sometimes very big ones, that don’t truly communicate in a connective way. From time to time, I still have to ask my colleagues to remind me what certain acronyms mean because there are so many that we use to avoid saying three-minute long organization or programmatic names.

Tim Hurshel-Burns recently explained how what happened to USAID is much more rooted in culture wars and democratic breakdown (I recommend reading his well-thought-out piece here). Yet he still acknowledges that there is a communications war and we need to fight better.

So as I think about the final months of 2025 and the shape of the world for 2026, here are the opportunities I see for communications:

1. WE HAVE TO INNOVATE: We cannot do things as we’ve always done in communications. We have to stay on top of new platforms and technologies and look for where the audiences we’re trying to reach are lingering and engaging. We also need to constantly be aware of engaging new and younger audiences—the next funders, voters, activists.
2. WE HAVE TO BE WILLING TO TAKE RISKS: Big or small, we have to step out of the traditional aid communication comfort zones, or the way we may have previously approached things, to try something new–-a new way to be heard, a new approach to be learned from.
3. WE HAVE TO SPEND MONEY. Yes, budgets are getting smaller and tighter, but we can be more intentional and audience-focused, using data and not subjective opinions to guide decisions. Sometimes we will need outside expertise do this well.
4. WE HAVE TO BE WILLING TO RETHINK OUR MESSAGING: As Hurshel-Burns points out, “once there’s a strong message, it actually needs to be pushed out—and not just through stale press releases and stuff that sounds like it went through three layers of review.” Yes. We’re in competition with over-simplicity and often, outright untruths.
5. WE HAVE TO REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT. Period.

In fiction writing there’s an overused phrase about showing versus telling a reader what they need to know. I’ve found this applies to almost all communications when you want to truly engage an audience: Show them why they want or need to care and you’ll be building connection and trust as you do.

We are entering a new era which requires those of us involved in communications to pay a new kind of attention. There will be new requirements of us and our roles. We will need to be willing to advocate and educate internally and listen more externally. And we will need to keep faces, stories and real people in front of us always so that we never let ourselves give in, give up or surrender the values we hold dear and the beliefs about change that keep us connected to the work we do.

@https://www.ircwash.org/@