What I am seeing now feels different. Not in its scale — the sector has faced serious moments before — but in its texture. The pressure is coming from multiple directions at once and targeting something more fundamental than funding or political will. It is targeting the language itself. The terms that the rights-based sector spent decades building into the shared vocabulary of accountability are being actively removed from the frameworks that gave them force.

For most of the history of documentary filmmaking, the stories of Indigenous communities were told by people who came from outside them. Sometimes those people were skilled and respectful. Often they were not. In either case, they carried assumptions about what the story was, who needed to hear it, and what form it should take. The result was a body of work that documented communities with almost no community control.

There is a particular kind of strategic planning session I have sat in many times. The facilitator is skilled. The wall is covered in sticky notes. The energy is real. The session ends with genuine excitement. And then, about six months later, the plan is quietly on a shelf and the organisation is operating almost exactly as it was before. This is not a failure of ambition. It is a structural problem.

I came to Belém with a particular kind of watchfulness. After years of attending COPs and designing communications strategies for the most consequential policy moments of the last decade, I know how easy it is for these gatherings to produce language that feels significant and deliver outcomes that are not. And yet. Belém surprised me.

There is a question I ask early in almost every organisational engagement. It is deceptively simple: why does your organisation exist? Not what it does. Not what impact it is trying to create. Why, at the most fundamental level, does this particular organisation need to be the one doing this work, in this way, with these people? Most leadership teams find this much harder than they expected.

There is a conversation that has been happening for decades in the world of climate, conservation, and Indigenous rights — and it has largely been happening in the wrong rooms. NGOs and Indigenous-led organisations understand the terrain, the politics, and the long arc of what change actually requires. Businesses have resources and a growing recognition that how they operate is not sustainable. These two worlds rarely meet. And when they do, the conversation often breaks down

Every organisation working in international development, conservation, or social justice tells stories. Most do it with good intentions. But good intentions are not enough. After 25 years in strategic communications, I've seen the same pattern repeated more times than I can count. An organisation wants to tell a community's story. They send a photographer and a writer. The donors respond. And somewhere in the process, the community becomes a backdrop.

Nature does not build to a template. Each ecosystem finds its own form — shaped by its particular environment, its available resources, the pressures it faces, and the relationships between the organisms that make it up. The result, in each case, is something that works: that adapts, that recovers, that sustains itself across time. Organisations rarely do this.

The organisations that raise the most effectively are not the ones with the most sophisticated donor strategies. They are the ones that have learned to tell the truth about their work in a way that the people funding it can actually feel. That is harder than it sounds. And it matters more than most communications advice acknowledges.

There is a question that sits underneath almost every organisational challenge I have been called in to help with. It is not about communications strategy or brand positioning. It is more fundamental than that: does everyone in this organisation actually agree on what it is for? The answer, more often than people expect, is no. And when you press on the specifics, the cracks appear.

Every organisation working on something that matters has a story worth telling. The question is rarely whether the story exists — it is whether anyone has taken the time to find it, shape it, and trust it enough to share it. The organisations struggling most to communicate are rarely struggling because their work is unclear. They are struggling because the story underneath the work has never been properly told.