In Translating Expertise into Influence, Communication Skills Are Key
Abstract:
Given the challenges facing humanity, it is critical that we follow the leadership of local experts, with lived experience. The Aspen Global Innovators Group has long supported such experts to gain the communications skills they need in order to become globally influential. Lessons we have learned include: 1) We need wider investment in communications and storytelling as core leadership competencies. 2) We need wider recognition of experts from the Global South as global leaders. 3) We need to transform spaces of power to be more genuinely inclusive. 4) We need to support depth of leadership in organizations and movements. 5) We need to erase an unhelpful distinction between ‘development’, and social justice. Since key contests are happening on the terrain of story, culture and meaning making, we urgently need more leaders and organizations that are skilled in this area if we are to make progress.
Full article:
The scale and complexity of the challenges facing humanity can feel daunting: climate change, rapidly-changing technology in the form of AI, war and genocide, and dramatic erosions of rights and closing civic space – to name a few. While it may be tempting for governments and global organizations to turn to top-down technocratic solutions, it is only by listening to those closest to complex challenges that we will ultimately be able to turn the tide. In this context it is critical to recognize the leadership of those with lived experience as vocal advocates and solution holders in countering harmful narratives, advocating for progressive policies and transforming weak and problematic systems.
A movement towards community-driven solutions and localization of ecosystem support has created new space for these experts to take up their rightful leadership role. Yet expertise is not enough. Even the most brilliant experts often need support in honing the communications, storytelling and advocacy skills that will enable them to elevate and scale these solutions; to enable them to influence policy and effect system-wide change at local, national, regional and global levels.
In 2013, the Aspen Institute Global Innovators Group (AGI) launched the New Voices Fellowship to provide this support. During the course of the past 11 years, AGI has supported the communications and storytelling capacity of locally rooted leaders in 54 countries around the world. Through a mixture of in-person and virtual training sessions across a year, fellows learn op-ed writing, how to deliver effective media talking points, how to craft stories, and the best way to utilize social media for impact. They receive mentoring help during their fellowship year, and as alumni, with their writing, speech and media preparations and advocacy plans.
We recently further expanded on this important fellowship to deepen investments in particular regions and communities through programs such as the Impact West Africa Fellowship, Healthy Communities Fellowship and Advanced Advocacy Program.
To date, around 200 experts, innovators and activists have benefited from these fellowships. They are sought-after thought leaders and advocates who are bringing about real change in areas ranging from sexual health and rights, mental health, climate change, disability, food security, and many more. Many have attained positions or gained access to spaces right after their fellowship, that have given them exponentially more influence, access and ability to shape policy and change systems than they had before.
Past fellows include Kennedy Odede (2013 fellow), founder and CEO of SHOFCO, Kenya’s largest grassroots movement, and one of Africa’s most esteemed social entrepreneurs and community organizers, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2024; Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng (2018) appointed the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health in 2020 – the first woman and first African to hold this position; and Sathya Ragu (2016), co-founder of Keyti, an Indian startup which was awarded the prestigious Earthshot Prize in 2022.
Odede, Mofokeng, Ragu, and all of the other Fellows are experts in their fields, and brilliant in their own right. Our aim, through the fellowships, has been to connect them to the strategic communications and media engagement capacities that help translate expertise into influence. Skills such as storytelling, op-ed writing, and media interviewing, and the connections and networks that facilitate access to influential media outlets and public platforms.
“The training I received from Aspen as a New Voices Fellow was and has continued to be instrumental in my academic career”, says former 2015 Fellow Dr. Esther Ngumbi, including helping her obtain tenure and propose a Science Communication course that she now teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. According to 2014 Fellow, Nigerian Bisi Alimi, the first person to ever come out as gay on Nigerian television, his exposure to strategic communication skills provided a global platform to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity issues across Africa. “It cemented me as one of the most trusted voices on the issue, an opportunity I didn’t have before the program,” he says. In the field of philanthropy, 2020 fellow Masego Madzwamuse, Oak Foundation’s environment programme manager, says “the Aspen Fellowship provided me with the skills to contribute to global narratives and be part of a movement that is shifting systems for lasting change.”
Over the last 11 years of training and supporting our stellar fellows, we have learned a few lessons about leadership, about communications, about how power and influence operate.
First, there needs to be more recognition that communication and storytelling are core leadership competencies. This seems self-evident in the fields of politics and business, but is still neglected when it comes to the nonprofit sector. Of course there are a number of standout leaders in the nonprofit world who are skilled public communicators, and the need for good strategic communication and storytelling is discussed at the organizational level, but communications and storytelling are strangely seldom talked about as key leadership skills. Even when leaders and organizations recognize the importance of communications, this is seldom backed up with the necessary budget, time and leadership buy-in. When it is properly funded and resourced, communications is often devoted to fundraising rather than advocacy or influence.
Organizations such as Reframe in the US and Puentes in Latin America have shown that investing in communications as a leadership skill pays huge dividends, yet there are far too few such resources – certainly for leaders and organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Second, although many foundations talk about working to advance a “localization” agenda that achieves impact both locally and globally, when leaders from the Global South are consulted for their perspectives it tends to be only about their own country or region, while global experts are thought to reside only in the US or Europe. It is long past time that thought leaders in places like Africa, Latin America, and Asia are consulted for global perspectives as well as local ones. Our former and current fellows such as Francisca Mutapi (neglected infectious diseases), Renzo Guinto (climate and health), and Sisonke Msimang (storytelling, politics, race), are making important contributions to the global discussion, but the circle could and should be much wider. Our fellows know this and since their fellowship year, people like Guinto and Msimang have helped establish regional communications-focused fellowships in SE Asia and Australia, respectively, to help train and uplift under-represented voices.
Third, Fellows’ impact and reach has often increased dramatically once they have access to the spaces and places where power operates – and again, that has tended to be Western gatherings (such as the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival, or the Skoll World Forum), and Western media (such as The Guardian or The New York Times). It is not enough for a few voices from the Global Majority to be temporary guests in these sorts of fora. We need both to transform these spaces to be genuinely inclusive, and to create and support other types of spaces, rooted in and from the Global South, to be just as globally influential.
Fourth, we need to think about how we invest in more than supporting individual stars to shine. While it is important that individual leaders are able to tell their stories and get their messages across, we recognize that leaders emerge from and are part of organizations and movements. We need to find ways to support depth of leadership – including depth of communication and storytelling capacity – in organizations and movements. We need to find ways of telling collective stories in addition to individual ones. Many current and former fellows are already experimenting with ways to do this – such as Advanced Advocacy Fellow Roseline Orwa, a Kenyan advocate for widows’ rights, who has given advocacy and communications training to 200 widow groups across 18 Kenyan counties.
Finally, we need to erase the artificial and unhelpful distinction between ‘development’, and social justice. Among other things this depoliticizes ‘development’ – which is then seen as merely a technical problem to be solved by experts – and cuts off countries like the US from the global conversation. There is no reason a quest for clean water in Malawi should be seen as a ‘development’ issue requiring technocrats, while in Flint, Michigan it’s seen as a political one, requiring organizers and activists. In a context where vital elections are taking place in so many countries, where the SDGs are failing, where gender justice and sexual health and rights are under attack, where authoritarians and anti-democratic forces are operating at a global level, it is important for social justice advocates everywhere to be able to recognize common struggles, learn from and support one another.
We began by making the case for communication and storytelling to receive their due recognition as key leadership skills. In fact, we need more than that. We need wider and urgent recognition that the key contestations of our day – over democracy, human rights and social justice – are happening primarily on the symbolic terrain of communication, story, culture and meaning-making. We urgently need more leaders and organizations that are skilled in this area, and recognize its centrality. We need foundations and investors of all kinds to support experts and activists to skill-up in this realm. If we do not all join in this, we will be severely hobbling our progress.
By Lola Adedokun and Brett Davidson
Brett Davidson is founder and principal at Wingseed LLC, where he supports social changemakers around the world to magnify their impact through storytelling and narrative change. In this role he has served as coach and mentor for the AGI’s Impact West Africa and Advanced Advocacy Fellows. Brett is also Lead, Narrative Field-Building with the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling.
Lola Adedokun is the late Executive Director of Aspen Global Innovators Group at the Aspen Institute and co-Chair of the Aspen Institute Forum on Women and Girls. She led a portfolio of programs that seek to expand opportunities for and access to health and prosperity for people living at the world’s margins. Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, Lola worked at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation as both Director of the Child Well-being Program and Director of the African Health Initiative. By building partnerships between implementers, policymakers and researchers, her work sought to further reduce inequality, strengthen communities, and promote evidence-based policy decision-making. In her dual roles, she focused her work on strengthening the systems and services that enable children and families to lead healthy, vibrant and self-determined lives.
Edited by Holly Kearl