Choosing Hope: On Authenticity, Courage, and What We Owe Each Other Right Now

By Paula Alvarado

Category: Leadership and Organisational Culture

Estimated read time: 6–7 minutes

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I have been in this work for twenty-five years. I have navigated financial crises, political transitions, institutional failures, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about outcomes that are never guaranteed. I have worked alongside people who put everything into this — land rights, climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, global health — and have watched them absorb defeat after defeat without losing the conviction that what they are doing matters.

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 inserting into international frameworks, negotiating into policy documents, and building into the shared vocabulary of accountability — terms like climate justice, gender equity, Indigenous rights, FPIC, LGBTQ+ inclusion — are being actively removed from the frameworks that gave them force. Simultaneously, official development assistance is contracting at a rate not seen in a generation: the OECD projected a drop of between nine and seventeen percent in 2025, following a nine percent decline in 2024, the first time in nearly thirty years that the four largest ODA contributors reduced their assistance simultaneously.

This is a moment that asks something specific of the people doing this work. Not just resilience in the face of difficulty — that is always required — but a more active and conscious choice about what to hold onto, what to be honest about, and where to direct the energy that is left.

I want to write about three things that I think matter more right now than they have in a long time: authenticity, courage, and hope. Not as aspirational values to be inscribed on a strategy document, but as practical orientations that shape how we work, what we say, and what we ask of the organisations and teams we are part of.

Authenticity as political act

When the vocabulary of rights is being systematically removed from the frameworks that were built to uphold them, what organisations say — and how they say it — becomes a form of positioning. Choosing to retain the language of rights, equity, and justice when institutional pressure is to soften or replace it is not a communications decision. It is an ethical one.

I have watched organisations respond to the current moment by quietly updating their external language — finding neutral substitutes for terms that have become politically targeted, avoiding frameworks that might attract scrutiny from funders whose priorities have shifted. I understand the instinct. The pressures are real and the consequences of losing funding are not abstract. But I think there is a cost that does not always get named, which is the erosion of credibility with the communities and partners whose trust was built precisely on the clarity and specificity of the commitments being made.

Authenticity in this context means being honest about what you believe and what you stand for, even when the environment makes that harder than it used to be. It means not using language that obscures rather than communicates. It means telling your funders, your partners, and the communities you work with what is actually true about your situation — including when that means naming constraints or uncertainty that it would be more comfortable to paper over.

This kind of authenticity is not naive. It does not require being reckless about risk. But it does require being willing to say: this is what we believe, this is what we are for, and this is how we are navigating a difficult moment without losing sight of either.

The courage the moment requires

Courage in organisational life is rarely dramatic. It does not usually look like a public stand or a bold statement. It looks like a leader who tells the board something it does not want to hear. A team that brings forward evidence that the programme is not working, knowing the conversation will be difficult. A funder relationship that is honest about misalignment rather than managing it around the edges indefinitely. A communications director who argues, internally, that softening the language will damage rather than protect the organisation’s credibility.

These are the acts of courage that actually determine whether organisations can sustain their integrity under pressure. They are also the acts that are most easily deferred. The board meeting can be managed. The funder conversation can be delayed. The communications question can be revisited after the next grant cycle. And over time, the accumulation of these deferrals produces organisations that have drifted from what they originally stood for without anyone having made a conscious decision to drift.

What makes courage possible in organisations is not individual heroism but culture. Teams where difficult conversations are expected rather than exceptional, where the gap between what is said publicly and what is known internally is kept small, where leaders model the willingness to be wrong and to change direction based on honest assessment — these are the teams that hold together under the kind of sustained pressure the sector is currently facing. Building that culture is not a crisis response. It is the work that has to happen before the crisis, so that the organisation has something to draw on when it arrives.

There is also a kind of courage required in simply continuing. The CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2025 describes a world where civil society is facing “growing authoritarianism, shrinking civic space, and a crisis of multilateralism,” while simultaneously noting that “courageous activists and communities” are demonstrating that “a more just and sustainable world is not only possible but already in the making.” That coexistence — of serious threat and genuine possibility — is the actual terrain. Courage means working in it honestly, without collapsing either side.

Hope as practice, not temperament

I want to be careful about the word hope, because it is often used in ways that are more sentimental than useful. Hope as a vague optimism that things will work out, as a temperamental disposition toward the positive, or as a rhetorical gesture at the end of a difficult paragraph — none of these are what I mean, and none of them are particularly useful in the current moment.

What I mean by hope is something more active and more demanding. It is the decision to keep showing up, making the case, building the relationships, and doing the work in the face of outcomes that are uncertain and sometimes genuinely bad. It is what Rebecca Solnit, writing about social change, calls “the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” It is not a feeling. It is a practice.

The research on this is instructive. Futerra’s global surveys on climate attitudes have documented what they call the danger of ‘climate fatalism’ — the belief that it is already too late to act, which functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy by removing the motivation to try. The antidote, their research suggests, is not the suppression of difficulty but the consistent communication of agency: evidence that action is possible, that it has worked before, and that the people doing it are not alone.

The same dynamic operates in organisational life. Teams that lose hope do not usually do so all at once. They do so gradually, through the accumulation of unacknowledged difficulty, unaddressed exhaustion, and the sense that the work is not being seen or valued by the organisations that should be supporting it. Leaders who understand this invest in the conditions that sustain hope — not by denying difficulty, but by making it possible for people to hold the difficulty and the possibility at the same time.

The choice in front of us

The current moment is genuinely difficult. The structures that the sector has relied on — funding frameworks, multilateral commitments, the language of shared rights — are under more systematic pressure than they have been in a generation. That is true, and it needs to be said clearly rather than managed around.

It is also true that the people and communities doing the most important work in the world — defending territories, protecting biodiversity, building governance systems that can outlast the political moment — have always operated in hostile conditions. The movements that have produced durable change have not done so by waiting for the environment to become more hospitable. They have done so by being clear about what they stand for, courageous in saying it, and sufficiently grounded in genuine relationships and genuine hope to keep going when the external signals are unfavourable.

The choice that the current moment presents is not between optimism and pessimism. It is between the kind of clarity, honesty, and commitment that makes organisations worth building, and the kind of drift that happens when those things are deferred one meeting at a time. That choice is available to every team, every leader, every organisation right now. It does not require waiting for the conditions to improve.

Hope is not the absence of fear. It is the decision that what we are doing matters enough to keep doing, even when we cannot be certain of the outcome. That is the decision I keep making. I think it is the right one.

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Paula Alvarado is the founder of Seeds for Change, a strategy and communications consultancy working at the intersection of Indigenous rights, climate, land governance, and global health.