After devastating aid cuts, Mercy Corps keeps fighting

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

TJADA D’OYEN MCKENNA: There’s this unprecedented need in the world right now. 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. The original set of executive orders telling us to halt work happened on a Friday afternoon, so it was right after inauguration. We are 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.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Tjada 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 Two-thirds of Mercy Corps programs have been rescinded this year due to Trump administration aid cuts. Tjada 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.

Tjada’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 Tjada McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps. Tjada, welcome back to the show.

[THEME MUSIC]

MCKENNA: Thank you for having me.

Copy LinkResponding to Trump’s pullbacks on foreign aid

SAFIAN: 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? What were you sort of feeling when that happened?

MCKENNA: 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. 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 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 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.

SAFIAN: U.S. government funding accounted for half of your funding, right?

MCKENNA: Exactly.

SAFIAN: About two-thirds of your programs were rescinded. I 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 urgent decisions.

MCKENNA: They were urgent decisions, and I have to say it was very clumsy, right? Usually when you work with the government, there are definitions for every single thing, so 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. 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, and 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, “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 okay, and still be prepared in case if another hurricane or earthquake had hit during that period, we still had to be prepared to respond.”

SAFIAN: I mean, the irony is your organization is all about responding to crisis 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.

MCKENNA: 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 government officials trying to stop their country director to make sure everyone got paid before they left. And 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 the emergency patient, but we also knew… You almost felt guilty for feeling bad because people have it so much worse than you do. There were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us.

SAFIAN: We’re now months in, past that initial shock. How much do you look at 2025 today as an inflection point, sort of a new normal for USAID orgs like Mercy Corps? Are you kind of holding your breath in a way in hopes that, “A next administration maybe will reinstate things?”

MCKENNA: 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’s the third and fourth effect. So in a lot of places, we rely on UN airplanes to get in and out of certain areas, and so a lot of UN organizations were also facing the same U.S. cuts that we were. So we are still digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is fundamentally changed, and right now we are trying to embrace that and move into the future while also knowing the future’s still quite uncertain.

Copy LinkThe global impact of humanitarian aid cuts

SAFIAN: I mean, there’ve been assertions about the human impact of these USAID cuts, and they’ve ranged from millions of lives lost to no direct lives lost per some in the administration. For Mercy Corps, in your own specific work, can you calculate the on-the-ground impact?

MCKENNA: So country by country, we can tell you what we are no longer able to do, and I shudder to think about what the worst cases for some of those people are. So for instance, in Nigeria, we were providing 12,000 pregnant women and 55,000 children with healthcare and nutrition. That was gone the next day. In 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. In Somalia, we have about 2 million children that we were serving meals and malnutrition products. We haven’t had those, and there definitely have been lives lost. Those numbers are real, but we just hope for the best.

SAFIAN: 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.

MCKENNA: No, and the U.S. government was providing 40% of the funding for humanitarian aid globally worldwide. 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 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 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.

Copy LinkHow Mercy Corps is trying to fill the funding gap

SAFIAN: 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?

MCKENNA: 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. While they’ve helped on the margins, I think they are largely sticking to their strategies.

SAFIAN: I heard you got some anonymous donations and even your own workforce sort of stepped up.

MCKENNA: 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 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.

SAFIAN: Have any brands stepped up with new support, or is it kind of the opposite that companies are more wary and holding back because they’re maybe worried about what the administration is going to say?

MCKENNA: 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. Others just see it as their corporate responsibility. And so they’ve hung in there and continued to increase or do new grants. Now they might be more lower key. I don’t know that any of them are doing Super Bowl ads, then work with us, but they’ve been wonderful partners.

The other piece is their employees also care and stepped up giving because they want… 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.

Copy LinkReinventing strategies amid unprecedented need

SAFIAN: You also mentioned that you’re in a position where you have to do more with less. Do you have to also reduce your ambition for what you can do, and how do you make those determinations?

MCKENNA: So there’s this 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. The need in the world is not going away. We are 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 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, but 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.

SAFIAN: 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.

MCKENNA: It’s weird. Our employees are at different stages of the grief curve, right? 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 and 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. You can’t do nothing. We’ve got to just radically rethink everything. And the way I’ve talked about it to my team is that we’re testing out different pathways.

So 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. And so we have to be flexible and agile.

SAFIAN: Fight, flight, or freeze. Tjada’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, Tjada 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. 

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Mercy Corps’ Tjada McKenna talked about losing 50% 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.

Copy LinkFrontline realities for aid workers in conflict zones

I have to ask you about Gaza. 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 Hamas’s 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 they’re getting?

MCKENNA: We have about 35 staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. We’ve had about 1,300 trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in. We’ve had some food in those trucks expire in that time period. And even without those trucks, our teams on the ground, we’re working with water desalination plants and 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. We have a staff member that is able to go in and out, and she talks about the weight loss that she’s seen in 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 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 95% of households there just don’t have enough water. And so someone said, “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? 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 there are trucks waiting across the border that could get in.

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.

SAFIAN: I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently off the record, who shared that starting years ago, they chose not to provide services in Gaza because they were worried and believed that Hamas would inevitably infiltrate their efforts. And obviously this is what the Israeli government or military at least is kind of saying, did you have worries about that? Does that matter when you’re trying to just feed people?

MCKENNA: 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 check the names, we check the lists 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. So that has been talked about as a threat. You do see looting, you do see hungry people, crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck, and you see children and people throwing themselves in front of trucks. The way to address people stealing aid or making food valuable is to flood the zone with food, and then it’s not as valuable.

I think more importantly, there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces in COGAT, which is the border authority officials saying that they’ve seen no mass aid diversion. U.S. government reports, internal former USAID audit reports said they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid. So we work in difficult environments and we all take vetting very seriously, but we know how to do this. We know how to work in these environments.

SAFIAN: So Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, this global instability, it seems like it’s rising everywhere. What do you think business leaders most misunderstand about the impact of these crises, not just locally, but how they ripple across markets and the economy?

MCKENNA: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, you have over a hundred armed groups and other governments involved, and all that is because of access to minerals and supply chain. These economies matter. I like to talk about the concept of a bigger us because we are also 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 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.

Copy LinkNavigating political sensitivities around climate and DEI

SAFIAN: You’ve also talked about natural disasters and climate issues as a threat multiplier. I know you have an initiative called Climate: Possible, aiming to raise $250 million. How is that going? Because there’s also resistance, at least here in the U.S., around some climate related issues.

MCKENNA: One of the earliest calls I got after President Trump was inaugurated was from a European foundation. It’s very invested in climate. And so they were like, “Are you still doing this work? And how do we talk about it, and what do we do?” And the reality is 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 we were like, “What’s the new language that people use?” Or sometimes people were finding language triggering that really was not what they meant it to be. And so we’re like, “You know what? Let’s not have this be a distraction.” And so we had to take a minute. 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.

SAFIAN: And so you did that with climate related words. Did you do that also with diversity, DEI? I mean, it’s another area that’s become sort of a hot button.

MCKENNA: 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 hold them for a minute, take them down, and to figure out what are the things that still explain your values or explain what you’re doing? We didn’t know what was legal or not. We didn’t know what the repercussions were. And so you had to do that for the greater good. But we do work when people are impacted by climate. Our job as humanitarians is to serve those who are left behind, who are most at risk of getting left behind that are maybe in minority communities or maybe discriminated against, women.

And so that’s the only way to do high quality work. That’s the only thing that works. And so I think trying to explain that to people and also trying not to get… One administration might’ve used one term, and now this new administration is saying that you’re evil for using that term. This is the work. What do you want to call it? They’re like… This is why this is important. To be in Afghanistan and not be trying to hire women, what is that saying? Is that really who we are and what we want to be doing?

SAFIAN: You had mentioned to me at one point sort of thinking about rebranding and calling Mercy Corps something else, which obviously has not happened. Was this sort of, I don’t know, concern about the terms part of why, “Let’s just table that for right now?”

MCKENNA: 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 this cacophony of things. It’s hard for anything to break through. Let’s just get past the early days and get to a status quo. Now, obviously, the way this administration works is by rattling things often and quickly. And so we don’t know when that normal is or if this is the new normal, but even before we just were trying to not do this in the midst of a lot of noise. And it’s not because anything was offensive or different, it was just trying to get people’s attention and bandwidth. And the issue now is just people’s attention is so divided.

Copy LinkCoping with stress and burnout

SAFIAN: I mean, with all these changes and disruptions and setbacks and disappointments, how do you avoid burnout personally? And I guess how do you help your team manage the stress? I mean, what Mercy Corps does was already plenty stressful.

MCKENNA: 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 grief for what we were supposed to be doing right now that we can’t do. So not just what was lost, but what could have been in a normal situation. And at some point I said to my leadership team, because we were the ones who had to make the decisions around who to lay off very quickly and all these 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 give ourselves a break.”

And so it’s like diffusing that leadership because I think as a crisis, you tend to hold it tight with a small group of people 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.

SAFIAN: As you’re talking about giving yourself permission, I’m thinking your commentary about whatever folks in Gaza who aren’t getting enough to eat, who are working for you, and you’re like, “I’m worrying about this meal I’m having. Why am I not enjoying it?” But I guess it’s human to feel because you had aspirations for where Mercy Corps was moving, and it’s not just that you can’t do things you were, it’s that you can’t do…. That dream has to become something else.

MCKENNA: Yes. You talked about earlier that we were supposed to be in the midst of a rebranding right now, so I should be out in the world celebrating. And so it’s mourning that… Especially as an American, we still have so many privileges that I have to just be really careful at how I talk to my staff about this because at some point you seem ridiculous, but we are mourning. You might be mourning what you thought you could do before or who you thought you were, or just as things change and it’s just a natural…

We can’t blunt our own human instincts, and we can’t play the pain Olympics either. But it’s weird. It’s weird. I have people say to me all the time, “We have so much stuff, America, why do you do things overseas?” And I’m like, “We can do both. You can care about both. It’s not either or.”

Copy LinkMaintaining duty of care for teams on the ground

SAFIAN: So what keeps you up at night now? I mean, as you’re trying to sort of look ahead for Mercy Corps, or can you not really look ahead? Is that part of the sleeplessness?

MCKENNA: No, I think we always have to look ahead and for me, talking to lots of people in other sectors who do totally different things has been really helpful in terms of shaking up your head space and bringing new things to light. I think what still keeps me up at night is we have a lot of staff in very remote, difficult to work places. I worry about some sudden onset thing where we can’t get to them or where we don’t have the funds to support them.

Because there’s always… Even in the midst of all of this chaos and drama, there’s always a terrible weather event or some other thing that’s going to come out of the blue, and you just have to be prepared. And so I just worried about our staff and our preparedness and our ability to really just continue to be ready at the drop of a dime given everything else going on.

SAFIAN: I mean, it’s interesting because of course, they’re all the people that you serve that obviously you worry about, but it’s your own team that sort of is what you think of first.

MCKENNA: Well, it’s our own team because most of our staff, 90% of our staff live and work in the communities we serve. So they’re part of the community we serve. And when programs ended and we had to lay people off, I thought about the drivers the most because weirdly, whenever I talk to drivers in different places, a lot of them are feeding a lot of people with that salary. That’s who I worry about. Part of the reason you agree to do this hard work is that you think the organization’s going to be there for you when you need them. And so that is one of the more sacred contracts and obligations we have.

And the reality is when the turmoil happened in Afghanistan and people were fleeing, I’m not a government. 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 quite important.

SAFIAN: For the community of folks who listen to this show, do you have any encouragement for them about how they might manage or think about this moment this time?

MCKENNA: What I would say is the world is small and to continue to think about this concept of a bigger us. 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 a way for themselves and their families with just the smallest amount of support. So I would encourage people to reach out, to not forget those people, and to just know that there can be a better future as possible for everybody, and we should contribute to that where we’re able to.

SAFIAN: Well, Tjada, as always, I really appreciate your candor. Thank you.

MCKENNA: Thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: It is remarkable that Tjada is optimistic after the setbacks Mercy Corps 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 Tjada’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 Tjada puts it on the concept of a bigger us, who knows where we can get to. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.