After devastating aid cuts, Mercy Corps keeps fighting, with Tjada D’Oyen McKenna

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1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. There's this like unprecedented need in the world right now. Three hundred million people across seventy countries who who classify as being in need of humanitarian assistance. That number is more than double what it was six years ago. The original set of executive orders telling us to halt work happened on a Friday afternoon. So it was right after inauguration.

1:54 We're not gonna get back to the size we were in terms of dollars, but how do we still like maintain an impact level? There's this opportunity for all of us to reinvent ourselves while we make the case again to remind people why this work was critical. That's Jada McKenna, CEO of MercyCorps, which provides aid relief in the world's most perilous places to the world's most at-risk people. Two thirds of Mercy Corps' programs have been rescinded this year due to Trump administration aid cuts. Jada has been under intense pressure, scrambling to find new ways to help those in need. even that she resorts to layoffs to keep Mercy Corps afloat. She's leading a team of aid workers in Gaza who are literally starving on the ground. Yet as she puts it, she isn't running away from burnout, but embracing the stress. For an organization built around responding to crises elsewhere, Mercy Corneau is at the center of its own trauma.

2:59 Jada's efforts and candor provide insights and lessons for all of us, so let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this Is rapid response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Jada McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps. Jada, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me.

3:19 It has been uh quite a challenging year for humanitarian organizations like yours. I want to first take you back for a moment to when the Trump administration announced it was stripping USAID, pulling pulling back a ton of US foreign aid. Where were you when you heard about that? Like what were you sort of feeling when that happened? You know, uh the original set of executive orders telling us to halt work happened on a Friday afternoon. So it was right after inauguration. I happened to be meeting with a board member. Uh we had lunch in DC right next to the White House. And I was getting in my car to come home and I realized I had like eight or nine missed calls and everything was blowing up and it was my team saying, We're supposed to stop everything. We have to halt everything and and I you know, it was just kind of shock and And disbelief really because I I I couldn't even begin to comprehend how to do that or or what how to tell people to do that.

4:12 U S government funding accounted for like half of your of your funding, right? Exactly. About Two thirds of your programs were rescinded. I mean, it's like it's like an existential crisis, a true existential crisis for the organization. So So what what did you do? I mean you faced a slew of like Urgent decisions. They they were urgent decisions and I have to say it was um it was very clumsy, right? Usually when you work with the government, there are like definitions for every single thing. Um so like very specific definition for stop or very specific definition for freeze. And in this case, the guidance wasn't there. When they said we had to stop doing everything

4:49 Our first concern was was safety for people. You know, if I have people in a remote area uh of a country or um in charge of delivering food to a school feeding program next day, that community didn't understand that we weren't showing up the next day. And they certainly didn't understand it was because the US government told us not to. But we had to go to work. Once it was We had to go about shutting down those programs across 40 different countries, lots of different labor laws to that. We consolidated some of our regions. Um, we just got to work to say, okay, like if the funding wasn't there for that program, um We'll we'll shut it down in the most responsible way possible and and we'll keep moving and and then address what we have to do with the US government to see what we can preserve, make sure our other funders are okay, and still be prepared in case, you know, if another hurricane or earthquake had hit during that period, we still had to be prepared to respond. Yeah, I mean the the the irony is your your organization is all about responding to crisis when it when it emerges and now the crisis becomes

5:58 You and in some ways in some of these communities you're you're sort of creating the crisis because they've become used to having you there. Yes, yes, yes. And I I I I worr a lot about staff safety, particularly in remote places uh where we were um a source of of survival for people where we provided access to food. And that that continued to plague me. We'd hear reports from colleagues of like government officials trying to stop their country director to make sure everyone got paid before they left. And My staff in Sudan, um, almost all of them are displaced from their homes themselves. So they're working for us in temporary shelters, still going through the same problems that everyone else is going through. And so this was a weird situation where our organization was the one that that had to be like the emergency patient. Uh, but we also knew like you almost felt guilty for feeling bad because like people have it so much worse than you do. But there were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us. We're now m months in past that initial shock.

7:00 How much do you look at 2025 today as like an inflection point, like sort of a new normal for USAD orgs like like MercyCore? Or are you kind of holding your breath in a way and in hopes that like, oh You know, a next administration maybe will reinstate things. Yeah, no, we know nothing's going back to the way it was, um, but we don't know exactly what that looks like going forward. The other thing that was surreal is there was this demonization of aid or demonization of aid agencies, a lot of misinformation about um the work we were doing and and how we were doing it.

7:35 Um, and then there are the third and fourth effects. So um, in a lot of places, we rely on like UN airplanes to get in and out of certain areas, right? And so the UN, a lot of UN organizations were also facing the same US cuts that we were. So we are still like digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is is fundamentally changed and are right now we're we're trying to embrace that and and move into the future while also knowing the future is still quite uncertain. I mean there been uh assertions about the the human impact of these USAID cuts and they've ranged from like millions of lives lost to no direct lives lost per sum in the administration. For for Mercy Corps and your own specific work, d Can you calculate

8:23 The on the ground impact? So you know, country by country, we can tell you what we are no longer able to do. And and I shudder to think about what the worst cases for for some of those uh people are uh so for instance in Nigeria we were providing twelve thousand pregnant women and fifty-five thousand children with um health care and nutrition. That was gone the next day. In Democratic Republic of Congo, uh, we had safe water programs. So now 162,000 people don't have access to that water uh for their sanitation needs, for food, for just basic daily living. You know, in Somalia we have about two million children that we were serving meals and and malnutrition products that we we haven't had those. Um and there definitely have been lives lost. Those those numbers are real. But we just hope for the best. Yeah, and y I guess you hope that someone or something else steps in to help

9:18 Fill some of those. Gaps. But you don't really have any control over that. No, and and the US government was providing forty percent of the funding for humanitarian aid globally worldwide. Like the entire value chain for uh malnutrition treatment uh was ta was really um reliant on a few different US Government contracts that that we didn't know that value chain was falling apart until it fell apart. So you know it was more than just funding of specific programs. It really is a whole architecture and and a system that that has been impacted at once. And I think that's why some of the after effects are still um not as clear.

10:01 There are no other governments that can pick this up. All the other governments combined, you know, aren't the size to pick it up. We have to completely reimagine uh and and try to do the same, if not more, with less resources into the system. S some aid organizations sort of hope Maybe a high net worth individual, some rich billionaire or foundation will sort of step in and fill the funding gaps. Have you seen any of that? How realistic is that? Yeah, it's nothing is going to fill the gap entirely of what was lost. And I think that's what we've all had to come to terms with. We have been very fortunate where we've had generous supporters or foundations that have supported us uh try to provide extra funding or surge. But but the reality is um I I think foundations and corporations rightfully and individuals uh rightfully don't want to see themselves as filling roles that they see government should be filling themselves, right? While they've helped on the margins, I think they are largely sticking to their strategies.

11:02 I heard you you got some anonymous donations and even your own workforce sort of Stepped up. We had employees that wanted to to donate to keep programs going. Um there's uh a project called Project. Project resource optimization, which is a bunch of scrappy former USAID employees who looked across everything that was canceled and identified the ones that were the most efficient and effective. Um, and then proceeded to try to match funders to those. So we've had we we just learned in the last week or two that we have a water and sanitation project in Nigeria we're able to turn on. We were able to turn back on a nearly complete water and sanitation project in Afghanistan, thanks to an individual donor.

11:41 Have any Brand stepped up with new support, or is it Is it kinda the opposite that like companies are more wary and holding back because they're may be worried about what the administration is gonna say. I was really worried about companies wanting to hold back and not wanting to be affiliated with um with giving, especially for overseas causes. And and those worries have not come to fruition. I think our corporate partners they still know the value of the work. They some of them are still in these markets where we work. Others just see it as their um as their corporate responsibility.

12:16 And so they have they've hung in there and and continued to increase or do new grants. Now, you know, they might be m more lower key. I don't I don't know that any of us are trying to do any of them are doing Super Bowl ads. But um, but they've they've been wonderful partners. The other piece is their employees also Care and stepped up giving because they want, um, you know, the US, we've always been a very charitable nation in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of employees wanted to to demonstrate that and continue it and and look to their companies to show that they were still doing those things. Hm. Y you also mentioned that

12:53 Like you're in a position where you you have to do more with less Do you have to also though Like reduce your ambition for what you can do. And and how do you make those determinations? Yeah. So there's this like unprecedented need in the world right now. So right now there are three hundred million people across seventy countries who who classify as being in need of humanitarian assistance. That number is more than double what it was six years ago. We have two actively declared famines going on in the world at the same time. That just doesn't happen in Gaza and Sudan, and lots of conflicts. The need in the world is not going away. We're not gonna get back to the size we were in terms of dollars.

13:35 But how do we still like maintain an impact level and quantify that? Um, what can we do more efficiently? So in situations where we were direct implementers before and had a large team, are there ways that we can accelerate work with local partners for them to take over pieces of it or ways to still get support to people um like through remote ways or can we accelerate some government transfer? So really trying to figure out what that next wave of impact looks like. We still will have funding to do some of the things that we always did. Um, but There's also this opportunity for all of us to reinvent ourselves while we make the case again to remind people while this why this work was critical.

14:17 It must be hard not to sort of Oh want to go back to doing the things that you knew were working and and and now you can't. I mean, it it must be hard, it must be frustrating. It's weird, like our employees are at different stages of the grief curve, right? Like everyone's experienced this differently. And as the CEO, I'm I'm furthest ahead because I've I've seen what's come across. Um people talk a lot about a fight or flight instinct, but there's a third dimension of freeze, right? And and just do what you always did or just hold still. And and what I've said to the team is that's just absolutely not an option. That that's an option's option to just go away and to die a slow, quiet death. Like you just you can't you can't do nothing. Like we've we've gotta just radically rethink everything. And the way I've talked about it to my team is like that we're testing out different pathways, right? So like One of the pathways is I'm still with the institutional funding doing the normal emergency, but maybe there are other types of partnerships and arrangements and just lots of different pathways to figure out what the best ones ultimately will be at the end of the day. And the whole environment is changing rapidly.

15:25 Um, and so we just we have to be flexible and agile. Fight, flight, or freeze? Jada's choices are an echo of what many business leaders are struggling with amid today's chaos. But while some hope to wait out the disruption, Jada is choosing action. And what adjustments is she making in talking about hotels? Topics from climate change to DEI. We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

16:07 Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

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17:18 I hope to see you there. Before the break, Mercy Court's Jada McKenna talked about losing fifty percent of her funding in a blink. Now she shares what her team is facing on the ground in Gaza, how she's navigating Hamas, and hot button topics from climate change to DEI to burnout. Let's dive back in.

17:46 I have to ask you about Gaza. You know, there there are all the reports about f famine in Gaza where you've had teams on the ground. Your Mid East director was on the show in October of twenty twenty three, soon after the Hamas's uh October seventh an attack as the initial Israeli military action was underway. Are are your teams still active on the ground there now? What are they seeing and what might our listeners be be missing in the news reports that kind of thing? We have about thirty five staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. Um

18:18 We've had about thirteen hundred trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in. We've had some food in that those trucks expire in in that time period. Um, and even without those trucks, our teams on the ground were working with water desalination plants and getting cle like supplying clean water to people. It's so dire right now. Our own team members are hungry. Um, they are worried about where their next meal is coming from. We have a staff member that is able to go in and out. Um, and she talks about like the weight loss that she's seen in her colleagues. about a million people are under evacuation orders in Gaz City. A lot of them, this is the fourth, fifth time they've moved. And what's different lately, which really concerns us is Um that sense of hope is really eroded. I think people feel like they've been just

19:10 left. This is as tough as it's ever been, and um our own staff are fighting for their own survival. We talk about the lack of food, but like ninety five percent of households there just don't have enough water. And so someone said, you know, a choice you're making every day is do I wash my hands? Do I drink a glass of water? Do I bathe the kids? Like what will the little water I have, what what do I do with it? And we just can't imagine. It's just been horrific and and to feel so powerless, especially when we know like we know there are trucks waiting across the border that that could get in. Like there are people like us that are really eager to do the work, like my staff who are looking for food themselves, who want to get out and do things. And we just know it's political will that's that's stopping that. I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently off the record who who shared that sort of starting years ago, they chose not to provide services in Gaza because they were worried and kind of believed that Hamas would inevitably infiltrate their efforts.

20:13 You know, and obviously this is what the Israeli government or military at least is kind of saying. Like Did you have worries about that? Does that matter when you're You know Trying to just feed people?

20:26 Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world to work. I mean, we all are under US anti terrorism laws. Our staff are vetted. We, we, you know, we check the names, we check the lists, because the risk of having a staff member be a part of Hamas is is too great to bear. We have not seen um mass aid diversion from Hamas. That that just has not been our experience. And most of our colleagues have have not experienced that. either. So um that is talked about as as a threat. Um you you do see looting, you do see like hungry people, like crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck trying and you see children and people throwing themselves in in front of trucks. The way to address like people stealing aid or making food valuable is to flood the zone with food and then it's not as valuable. Um so it it's it's yeah, I it just and you know, I think more importantly, um there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces and and and Cogat, which is the border authority officials, saying that they've seen no mass. Mass aid diversion. US government reports internal former USAID audit reports said there's no reports of they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid. So you know, I we work in difficult environments and uh we all take vetting very seriously.

21:45 And but we know how to do this. We we we know how to work in these environments. Yeah. Uh uh so Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, uh like this global instability, it seems like it's rising everywhere. What do you think business leaders sort of most misunderstand about the impact of these crises? Not not just locally, but how they how they ripple across uh markets and the economy? Yeah, they these there are, you know, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you have like over a hundred armed groups and other governments involved, and and all that is because of um access to mil minerals and and supply chain. Um these economies matter.

22:25 I like to talk about the concept of a bigger us because we are all so interconnected right now. And I think there's this time period where everyone's just trying to close their borders and look inwards. Um but but you can't do that. And you know, especially right now, there's some reports of Ebola uh breaking out in in um Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda. We're not this hermetically sealed bubble, and um It it matters. All those places matter and then those people matter. Mm. You've also uh talked about you know, natural disasters and and climate issues as a as a threat multiplier. I know you have an initiative called Climate Possible to try not aiming to raise uh two hundred and fifty million dollars. Like

23:07 How is that going? I mean Because there's also resistance, at least here in the US, around some climate related issues. One of the earliest calls I got after after President Trump was inaugurated was from a European foundation that's very invested in climate. And so um they were like, Are you still doing this work? And and how do we talk about it? What do we do? Um and the reality is like all the populations we serve are heavily affected by by climate, whether it's extreme heat, whether that's flooding, when the executive orders started flowing

23:39 there did seem to be this political backlash. Um, we temporarily took down our climate page just because like we were like, okay, what's the new language that people use? Or sometimes people were finding language triggering that really was like You know, not what you the what they meant it to be. And so we're like, you know what, like let's not have this be a distraction. And so we just we had to take a minute. Like we still kept on um doing our program or doing our work. But we also wanted to make sure that we could talk to people in a way that they would hear it and and comprehend it and um not just be turned off by the use of a Time.

24:19 Mm. And and so you did that with with climate related words. Did you Do that also with Like diversity, D E I, I mean it's another area that Became It's become sort of a hot thing. We had to look at everything, right? In in the immediate days when everything was just

24:35 coming at you so quickly. And we also were facing um a lot of misinformation and kind of social media threats. Um, the best thing to do was to just like Hold them for a minute, take them down, um, and to figure out like what are the things that still um explain your values or explain what you're doing. You know, we didn't know what was legal or not. We we didn't know what the repercussions were. Um and so you you had to do that for for the greater good, but um You know, w w we do work when people are impacted by climate. Um Our job as humanitarians is to serve those who are like left behind who are most at risk of getting left behind. that are maybe in minority communities or maybe discriminated against like women or and so you you can't that that's the only way to do high quality work. Like that that's the only thing that works. Um and so I think

25:28 Trying to explain that to people and also trying not to get you know, one administration might have used one term and now this new administration is saying that you're evil for using that term. Okay, this is the work. What do you want to call it? Um, this is why this is important, you know, like if I'm i to be in Afghanistan and not be trying not be hiring women Like what is that saying? And is that really who we are and what we want to be doing? You had mentioned to me at one point sort of thinking about rebranding and calling Mercy Core something else, which Obviously it has not happened. Like w was this sort of I don't know, concern about the terms part of why like let's just table that for right now.

26:08 when President Trump won the election, we decided to put things off for a few months because what we learned from the last Trump term was the early days are really noisy. There's just like this cacophony of things. It's hard for anything to break through. Let's just like get past the early days and get to a status quo. Now obviously like the way this administration works is by kind of rattling things often and quickly. And so we don't know when that like normal is or if this is the new normal. But you know, even b b before, we just were trying to like not do this in the midst of a lot of noise. And it's not because anything was offensive or um different. It was just like trying to get people's attention and bandwidth. And that's that's the issue now is this like people's attention is so divided. I mean, with all these these changes and and disruptions and setbacks and disappointments, how do you avoid Burnout.

27:02 Like personally. You know, and I guess ha how do you help your team manage the stress? I mean, what Mercy Corps does was already Plenty stressful. I mean One of the things I had to learn, I had to give myself permission to acknowledge that there was um sadness there and grief and not just grief for what has happened, but like grief for what we were supposed to be doing right now that we can't do. Um, so not just what was lost, but like what could have been in a normal situation.

27:31 And at some point I said to my leadership team, you know, like, because we were the ones who had to make the decisions around who to lay off very quickly and you know, this all these like awful decisions. But I was like, you know what, there's a layer of people that were not as traumatized by that. Um let's get them in here and and make sure they're leading these things to like give ourselves a break right and so it's like diffusing that that leadership tea that leadership um and and You know, because I think in as a crisis you you tend to like hold it tight with a small group of people d you know, doing everything. And I think quickly letting go of that command and control, um, and really being clear and and letting other people take things over has has been really invaluable and it will continue to be invaluable. As you're talking about giving yourself Permission

28:19 I'm thinking your commentary about You know whatever. folks in Gaza who aren't getting enough to eat who are working for you And you're like I'm I'm worrying about this meal I'm having, like why am I not enjoying it? But I guess

28:32 It's it's human to to feel aspirations for where Mercy Cor was moving and it it It's not just that you're you can't do things you were, it's that you can't do That that dream has to become something else. Yes. You talked about earlier that we were s you know supposed to be in the midst of a rebranding right now. So I should be like out in the world, like s celebrating and um so it it's it's more than that. And it's also, you know, we still especially as an American, we still have so many privileges that it's um You know, uh it it's it's just I yeah, I have to just be really careful how I talk to my staff about this because at some point you seem ridiculous. Um but we are mourning like what we you know, you might be warning like what you thought you could do before or like who you thought you were, or like just as things change and

29:21 And it's just a natural like we can't blunt our own human instincts, right? Um and and we can't play the pain Olympics either. So but it's It's weird. It's weird. I I have people say to me all the time, We have so much stuff in America. Like, why do you do things overseas? And I'm like, You we you know, we can do both. Like you can care about both. It's not either or. Hm. So what keeps you up at night now? I mean, as you as you're trying to sort of look ahead for Mercy Core, or or can you not really look ahead? Is that is that part of the sleeplessness? No, I I think we always have to like look ahead and and I For me, talking to lots of people in other sectors who do totally different things has been really helpful in terms of um shaking up your headspace and and bringing new things to light. I think what still keeps me up at night is um, you know, we have a lot of staff in very remote difficult to work places. Or worry about some sudden onset thing where we can't get to them or where like we don't have the funds to support them. Um and that that it's it's just because there's always like even in the midst of all of this chaos and drama.

30:27 There's always like a terrible weather event or some other thing that's gonna come out of the blue. And and you just have to be prepared. And so Like that I just worried about our staff and our preparedness and our ability to to really just continue to be ready at the drop of a dime given everything else going on. I mean it's interesting because of course there they're all the people that you serve that obviously you worry about, but but it's your own team that sort of Is what you think of first. Well it it's our own team because most of our staff, like ninety percent of our staff live and work in the communities we serve. So so they're part of the community we serve. And when we when programs ended and we had to lay people off, I thought about the drivers the most because

31:08 Weirdly, like whenever I talk to drivers in different places, like a lot of them are feeding a lot of people with that salary, right? That's who I worry about. Part of the reason you agree to do this hard work is that you think the organization's gonna be there for you when you need them. And so it that's there that is one of the more sacred contracts and obligations we have. And and the reality is like you know, when the turmoil happened in Afghanistan and people were fleeing. Like I'm not a government. I don't I can't just give people visas to leave the country. But making sure I can meet that duty of care where they are is is quite important. For the community of folks who listen to this show Do you have any

31:49 Uh Encouragement for them about how they might manage or think about this this moment, this time? What I would say is The world is small and and to continue to think about this concept of a bigger Us. Um, and one thing that gives me a lot of hope is people are also resilient, right? At the end of the day, there's some instincts that kick in with a little bit people will make away for themselves and their families with with just the the smallest amount of support. So um I would encourage people to to to reach out to to not forget those people and

32:27 To just No, that that there can be a better a better future is possible for everybody. Um, and and we should contribute to that where we're able to. Well Jada, as always, I I really appreciate your candor. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

32:43 It is remarkable that Jada is optimistic after the setbacks MercyCorps has had as a business. The harsh conditions that she and her team are trying to address in the world are challenging enough, let alone being forced to do more with less. But Jada's inclination toward action and her unwillingness to throw in the towel, that's the sort of resilience we all need to have. No organization can meet all its goals and no roadmap to the future unfolds as planned. But if we focus on our bigger goals and as Jada puts it, on the concept of a bigger US, who knows where we can get to?

33:22 I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashimaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli.

33:48 Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Lytal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponesshow.com. Yeah.

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