FW 2025 Impact Report final - Flipbook - Page 7
Friends,
As we close out the year, I’m thinking about the position many of us find ourselves in: standing
between the urgency of now and the gravity of what comes next.
Since January, a barrage of political action and rhetoric has presented us with a dilemma: the
need to navigate right-now communication challenges without neglecting or undermining
long-term work to shift narratives and mindsets. How can we even think about building
demand for transformational change when violence and harm is happening right in front of us?
For the last 12 months, almost all my conversations with partners and funders have been about
this tension. Responding to urgent communications crises can inadvertently lead us to make
reactive decisions that either fail to advance or actually work against long-term goals. At the
same time, focusing on long-term narrative and culture change risks ignoring the
conflagrations in front of us.
Here’s what I can say after spending two decades right in the middle of this paradox: Our
communications don’t have to either win the present or build the future. Instead of choosing
between now OR later, we can frame the now FOR later.
Our short-term communications can feed long-term change, and this year, I’ve seen proof.
I’ve seen partners refuse to play into the
