A Call to Action for Foundation and Nonprofit Communicators in 2026

Why this moment demands more of us—and why we’re ready

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence, it’s worth remembering something fundamental: this nation was not built on consensus. It was built on argument.

From the beginning, Americans have debated freedom, responsibility, patriotism, and the role of institutions. Democracy here has never depended on agreement. It has depended on our ability to live—and move forward—through deep disagreement.

That history matters now.

Because today, America’s democratic muscles are under real strain. According to Pew Research, 40% of adults under 30 now use TikTok as a search engine. AI tools generate misinformation at scale, confidently hallucinating facts about organizations, missions, and leaders. Truth no longer travels on authority alone. Polarization isn’t a side condition—it’s the environment we’re operating in.

And yet, something else is also true.

People are hungry for meaning. For credibility. For institutions that don’t just speak, but listen. That can hold complexity, face disagreement, and convene across differences without flinching.

For those of us working in nonprofit, foundation, and philanthropic communications, this is the moment our field was built for.

We’re No Longer Just Storytellers. We’re Stewards of Truth.

When misinformation spreads faster than fact, communications can’t afford to be reactive.

During COVID, public health institutions learned this the hard way. Guidance that arrived weeks late—or wrapped in technical language—left a vacuum. Conspiracy theories filled it in hours. Research from the MIT Media Lab found that false information about COVID spread six times faster than accurate information.

Meanwhile, organizations that corrected falsehoods early, plainly, and repeatedly—often through trusted local messengers—performed far better than those relying on distant authority alone.

The lesson is simple.

Communicators now share responsibility for information integrity. That means tracking narrative environments, not just media coverage. Preparing leaders to speak with clarity, not caveats. Knowing when to respond, when to add context, and when restraint serves the truth better than noise.

Truth needs early, local, persistent defenders. That’s part of the job now.

We Have to Build Bridges Without Erasing Our Values.

Polarization has made many institutions retreat into caution. But avoidance has made us ghosts in our own conversations.

Here’s what experience is showing us: honesty works better than polish.

Organizations working on democracy, climate, and racial equity have seen that naming tradeoffs, fears, and disagreement lowers defenses more effectively than consensus messaging ever could. When the Othering & Belonging Institute names the tension between “us” and “them,” people lean in. When More in Common maps the exhausted majority who feel unseen by the extremes, people recognize themselves.

This isn’t about false balance. It’s about respect.

People rarely change their minds because they’re cornered. They change when they feel heard and taken seriously. That requires communication that invites people in instead of sorting them out.

We have to hold moral clarity and human complexity at the same time. That isn’t weakness. It’s the work.

Broadcasting Is Over. Convening Is the Work.

The most trusted organizations in 2026 won’t be the loudest. They’ll be the ones that know how to bring people together.

We see this already. When Communications Network LOCALs gather in bars and boardrooms, museums and coffee shops, trust gets built one conversation at a time. When foundations create peer learning cohorts instead of just issuing reports, relationships form that outlast any single initiative.

Community is no longer an engagement tactic. It’s communications infrastructure.

That means designing conversations, setting norms, and turning listening into visible action. The measure of success isn’t reach alone—it’s participation, trust, and whether people leave more connected than when they arrived.

Social and AI Are Now How People Decide What’s True.

People aren’t navigating institutions the way they used to. They’re searching TikTok. They’re watching YouTube. They’re asking ChatGPT—and accepting the first answer that sounds plausible.

AI systems routinely summarize organizations incorrectly: flattening nuanced work, fabricating details about mission or leadership, or blending multiple organizations into misleading composites.

Communications now has to be built for discoverability and interpretation. That means making sure accurate, values-aligned information appears where people actually search. It means monitoring how AI systems describe our work and structuring content so it survives summarization without distortion.

In this environment, you’re either shaping the narrative—or being shaped by it.

Trust Travels Through People, Not Logos.

Across the sector, the most effective messages no longer come from institutions alone. They come from people.

Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer found that “a person like me” is now trusted more than CEOs, government officials, or journalists. We see this when nonprofit leaders speak candidly about hard choices. When grantees explain impact in their own words. When peer-to-peer stories outperform even the most polished campaigns.

The role of the communicator is shifting—from controlling voice to cultivating messengers. Coaching leaders. Supporting distributed credibility. Creating shared language instead of rigid talking points.

That’s how trust scales now.

Internal Communications Is Where Credibility Is Won or Lost.

In moments of change—reorganizations, strategy shifts, public scrutiny—staff and partners become the most powerful interpreters of an organization’s integrity.

When leaders delay sharing hard news internally, rumors fill the gap. When staff learn key information from the press or social media, trust erodes instantly. When leaders over-script internal messages instead of speaking plainly, people hear fear instead of confidence.

The organizations that weather disruption best do a few things consistently:

• They communicate early

• They name uncertainty instead of hiding it

• They invite questions—and actually answer them

Internal communications isn’t about morale management. It’s about alignment. It’s about treating staff as adults and partners, not audiences to be managed.

You can't project trust if you don't practice trust.

Communications Leadership Is Organizational Leadership.

The most effective communications leaders today aren’t just refining language. They’re spotting misalignment before it becomes crisis. Translating between boardrooms and communities. Helping institutions understand how decisions will land in the real world.

They’re not asking for a seat at the table. They’re already at the table—whether the organization recognizes it or not.

Communications teams are strategy teams. They know what will resonate and what will backfire. They turn intention into impact.

It’s time for the field to claim that role unapologetically. Communication isn’t a support function for strategy. It’s how strategy becomes legible, legitimate, and durable.

The Moment We’re In.

This isn’t a crisis of attention. It’s a crisis of trust.

That makes communicators—especially those working in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector—essential to what comes next.

If we don’t step up, institutions will keep losing ground to actors who move faster and care less about accuracy. The space between us will keep widening. The democratic habits this country has relied on since its founding—the patience to listen, the courage to speak plainly, the discipline to stay in hard conversations—will continue to erode.

But that isn’t what has to happen.

What happens next is we do the real version of our jobs. We tell the truth early and often. We bring people together instead of sorting them out. We turn our organizations into places worth trusting—starting from the inside out.

We remember what we already know: that communication is not decoration. That words create worlds. That the quality of our democracy depends on the quality of our conversations.

Two hundred fifty years ago, this country bet everything on disagreement—on the belief that freedom meant the freedom to argue, and the responsibility to keep talking anyway.

That idea has never needed defending more than it does right now.

And we’re the ones equipped to defend it.

Not with certainty, but with clarity.

Not with control, but with courage.

Not by silencing disagreement, but by making space for it to be productive instead of destructive.

So we start where this work always starts.

Reach out to one communicator you trust. Ask what’s working. Ask what’s hard. Ask what they’re worried about.

You don’t have to do it alone.

We’ve been preparing for this moment, whether we knew it or not.

Now we rise—together—to meet it.