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

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1:30That 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. We're not going to get back to the size we were in terms of dollars, but how do we still 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.

2:06That's Jada McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, 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 Two-thirds of Mercy Corps' programs have been rescinded this year due to Trump administration aid cuts.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 as 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 Corps now is at the center of its own trauma.

2:46Jada'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. It has been 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 back a ton of U.S. foreign aid. Where were you when you heard about that? Like, what were you sort of feeling when that happened? You know, the original set of executive orders telling us to halt work happened on a Friday afternoon.

3:32So it was right after inauguration. I happened to be meeting with a board member. We had lunch in D.C. 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 I, you know, it was just kind of shock and disbelief, really, because I couldn't even begin to comprehend how to do that or how to tell people to do that. U.S. government funding accounted for like half of your funding, right? Exactly. And about two-thirds of your programs were rescinded.

4:08I mean, it's like an existential crisis, a true existential crisis for the organization. So what did you do? I mean, you faced a slew of like urgent decisions. They were urgent decisions. And I have to say it was it was very clumsy. Right. Usually when you work with the government, there are like definitions for every single thing. 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. Our first concern was safety for people. You know, if I have people in a remote area of a country or 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.

4:51And they certainly didn't understand it was because the U.S. government told us not to. But we had to go to work once it was clear what was going to be cut or what wasn't going to be cut. 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. We closed some country offices. We just got to work to say, OK, like if the funding wasn't there for that program, we'll shut it down in the most responsible way possible. and we'll keep moving and then address what we have to do with the U.S. government to see what we can preserve, make sure our other funders are OK 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.

5:36Yeah. I mean, the irony is your your organization is all about responding to crisis when it when it emerges. And now the crisis becomes you. And in some ways, in some of these communities, you're sort of creating the crisis because they've become used to having you there. Yes, yes, yes. And I worried a lot about staff safety, particularly in remote places where we were a source of survival for people, where we provided access to food. And 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.

6:14And my staff in Sudan, 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 had to be like the emergency patient. But we also knew like you almost felt guilty for feeling bad because like people have it so much worse than you do. There were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us. We're now months in, past that initial shock. How much do you look at 2025 today as like an inflection point, like sort of a new normal for USAID or like Mercy Corps?

6:57Are you kind of holding your breath in a way and in the 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, 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 the work we were doing and how we were doing it. And then there are the third and fourth effects. So in a lot of places, we rely on like U.N. airplanes to get in and out of certain areas. Right. And so the U.N., a lot of U.N.

7:33organizations were also facing the same U.S. cuts that we were. So we are still like digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is fundamentally changed. And right now, we're trying to embrace that and move into the future while also knowing the future is still quite uncertain. I mean, there have been assertions about the human impact of these USAID cuts. And they've ranged from like millions of lives lost to no direct lives lost per some in the administration. information for for Mercy Corps and your own specific work can you calculate 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 12 ,000 pregnant women and 55 ,000 children with health care and nutrition That was gone the next day.

8:33In Democratic Republic of Congo, we had safe water programs. So now 162 ,000 people don't have access to that water for their sanitation needs, for food, for just basic daily living. You know, in Somalia, we have about 2 million children that we were serving meals and malnutrition products that we haven't had those. And there definitely have been lives lost. Those numbers are real, but we just hope for the best. Yeah, and I guess you hope that someone or something else steps in to help fill some of those gaps, but you don't really have any control over that. No, and the U.S. government was providing 40 % of the funding for humanitarian aid globally, worldwide.

9:20Like, the entire value chain for malnutrition treatment was really reliant on a few different U.S. government contracts 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 a system that has been impacted at once. And I think that's why some of the after effects are still not as clear. 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 and try to do the same, if not more, with less resources into the system.

10:03Some 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? 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 try to provide extra funding or surge. But the reality is, I think foundations and corporations rightfully and individuals rightfully don't want to see themselves as filling roles that they see government should be filling themselves, right?

10:45While they've helped on the margins, I think they are largely sticking to their strategies. I heard you got some anonymous donations and even your own workforce sort of stepped up. We had employees that wanted to donate to keep programs going. There's a project called 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 and then proceeded to try to match funders to those. So we've had, 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.

11:22We were able to turn back on a nearly complete water and sanitation project in Afghanistan thanks to an individual donor. Have any brands stepped up with new support or is it kind of the opposite that like companies are more wary and holding back because they're maybe worried about what the administration is going to say? I was really worried about companies wanting to hold back and not wanting to be affiliated with giving, especially for overseas causes. And those worries have not come to fruition. I think our corporate partners, they still know the value of the work. Some of them are still in these markets where we work.

11:59Others just see it as their corporate responsibility. And so they have hung in there and continue to increase or do new grants. Now, you know, they might be more lower key. I don't know that any of us are kind of, any of them are doing Super Bowl ads. But they've been wonderful partners. The other piece is their employees also care and stepped up giving because they want, you know, the U.S., we've always been a very charitable nation in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of employees wanted to demonstrate that and continue it and look to their companies to show that they were still doing those things.

12:38You also mentioned that, like, you're in a position where you have to do more with less. Do you have to also, though, like reduce your ambition for what you can do? 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 300 million people across 70 countries 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.

13:16The need in the world is not going away. We're not going to get back to the size we were in terms of dollars, but how do we still maintain an impact level and quantify that? 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 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.

13:57But there's also this opportunity for all of us to reinvent ourselves while we make the case again to remind people why this work was critical. It must be hard not to sort of want to go back to doing the things that you knew were working and now you can't. I mean, 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 furthest ahead because I've seen what's come across. People talk a lot about a fight or flight instinct, but there's a third dimension of freeze, right?

14:32And just do what you always did or just hold still. And what I've said to the team is that's just absolutely not an option. That's an 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 got to 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.

15:09And the whole environment is changing rapidly. 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. So how is she managing a team of 35 aid workers on the ground in Gaza? And what adjustments is she making in talking about hot button topics from climate change to DEI? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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17:23So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Before the break, Mercy Corps' Jada McKenna talked about losing 50 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.

17:59I have to ask you about Gaza. You know, there are all the reports about famine in Gaza where you've had teams on the ground. Your Mideast director was on this show in October of 2023, soon after the Hamas' October 7th attack as the initial Israeli military action was underway. Are your teams still active on the ground there now? What are they seeing and what might our listeners be missing in the news reports that are getting? We have about 35 staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. we've had about 1300 trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in we've had some food in that those trucks expire in that time period and even without those trucks our teams on the ground were working with water desalination plants and getting like supplying clean water to people it's so dire right now our own team members are hungry they are worried about where their next meal is coming from.

18:58We have a staff member that is able to go in and out. And she talks about like the weight loss that she's seen and her colleagues. About a million people are under evacuation orders in Gaza City. A lot of them, this is the fourth, fifth time they've moved. And what's different lately, which really concerns us, is that sense of hope is really eroded. I I think people feel like they've been just left. This is as tough as it's ever been. And our own staff are fighting for their own survival. We talk about the lack of food, but like 95 % 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?

19:40Do I drink a glass of water? Do I bathe the kids? Like the little water I have, what do I do with it? And we just can't imagine. It's just been horrific. and to feel so powerless, especially when we know, like, we know there are trucks waiting across the border 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 stopping that. I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently, off the record, 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.

20:27You 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? Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world to work. I mean, we all are under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. Our staff are vetted. We, you know, we check the names, we check the list because the risk of having a staff member be a part of Hamas is too great to bear. We have not seen mass aid diversion from Hamas. That just has not been our experience. And most of our colleagues have not experienced that either.

21:08So that is talked about as a threat. You do see looting. You do see, like, hungry people, like crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck. And you see children and people throwing themselves 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. So it's, yeah, I just, and, you know, I think more importantly, there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces and COGAT, which is the border authority officials, saying that they've seen no mass aid diversion. And U.S. government reports internal former USAID audit report said there's no reports of they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid.

21:51So, you know, we work in difficult environments and we all take vetting very seriously. And but we know how to do this. We know how to work in these environments. Yeah. So Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, 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 just locally, but how they ripple across markets in the economy. Yeah, these there are, you know, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you have like over 100 armed groups and other governments involved. And all that is because of access to minerals and supply chain.

22:37These economies matter. 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. But you can't do that. And, you know, especially right now, there are some reports of Ebola breaking out in Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda. We're not this hermetically sealed bubble. And it matters. Those places matter. And then those people matter. — You've also talked about, you know, natural disasters and climate issues as a threat multiplier. I know you have an initiative called Climate Possible, aiming to raise$250 million.

23:20Like, how is that going? I mean, because there's also resistance, at least here in the U.S., around some climate-related issues. One of the earliest calls I got after President Trump was inaugurated was from a European foundation that's very invested in climate. And so they were like, are you still doing this work? And how do we talk about it? What do we do? And the reality is, like, the populations we serve are heavily affected by climate, whether that's extreme heat, whether that's flooding. When the executive orders started flowing, there did seem to be this political backlash to climate. 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 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 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 comprehend it and not just be turned off by the use of a term.

24:34And so you did that with climate-related words. Did you do that also with diversity, DEI? I mean, it's another area that has become sort of a hot button. We had to look at everything, right? In the immediate days when everything was just coming at you so quickly and we also were facing a lot of misinformation and kind of social media threats. The best thing to do was to just like hold them for a minute, take them down, and to figure out like what are the things that still explain your values or explain what you're doing. You know, we didn't know what was legal or not. We didn't know what the repercussions were.

25:13And so you had to do that for the greater good. But, you know, we do work when people are impacted by climate. 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. And so you can't, that's the only way to do high quality work. Like, that's the only thing that works. And so I think 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.

25:52Okay, this is the work. What do you want to call it? Like, you know, this is why this is important. You know, like if I'm to be in Afghanistan and not be trying, not be hiring women, like, what is that saying? 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 Corps something else, which obviously has not happened. Like, was this sort of, I don't know, concern about the terms part of why, like, let's just table that for right now? 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.

26:32There'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 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 different. It was just like trying to get people's attention and bandwidth. And that's the issue now is this like people's attention is so divided.

27:07I mean, with all these these changes and disruptions and setbacks and disappointments, how do you avoid burnout? Like personally, you know, and I guess how do you help your team manage the stress? I mean, what Mercy Corps does was already plenty stressful. fault? I think one of the things I had to learn, I had to give myself permission to acknowledge that there was 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. So not just what was lost, but like what could have been in a normal situation. 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.

27:51and, you know, 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. Let's get them in here and make sure they're leading these things to, like, give ourselves a break, right? And so it's, like, diffusing that leadership. And, you know, because I think in a crisis, you tend to, like, hold it tight with a small group of people, you know, doing everything. And I think quickly letting go of that command and control and really being clear and letting other people take things over has been really invaluable, and it will continue to be invaluable.