The Future of Social Impact is not Resistance: It’s Reinvention
Five years ago, we gathered 400 people working in women’s rights and social justice at County Hall in London.
We were bringing together women working in different sectors, climate, health and gender, to share ideas, build connections across sectors, and challenge the way development work is structured. March 2020, as you may remember, was the start of the Covid-19. Everyday the team and I would gather at the office to watch the TV and find out if the event would go ahead. The daily anticipation was made extra exciting due to our lack of event insurance. We were novices, we had only started our agency a few years and we had no place and no right to ‘host’ a community of partners, renowned in their work on these issues. But we were adamant that there was a massive problem in how we were working together, and that a conversation was needed.
The conversations we had on that day, about power, race, money, politics were transformational in how we understood our work and our role in the sector, it changed everything for us. On that same day, just down the road, the WOW Festival at Southbank was bringing together thousands of people around similar themes—activism, justice, and collective action—but with a broader public audience. I remember thinking: What would happen if we combined these spaces? What if the expertise of targeted policy advocacy and movement-building merged with the cultural force of arts, storytelling, and mass mobilization? What could be achieved. Tonight, this room holds the answer to that question.
This moment we are in: we saw this moment coming. We’ve spent years talking about the rise of far-right agendas, the rolling back of rights and freedoms, and the shrinking of civic spaces.
We’ve watched as the very platforms that once gave us power to mobilise, make issues visible and hold groups accountable are now being weaponized against us. The language we created to make injustice visible has been twisted to divide and discredit us. Today, we are witnessing a small group of oligarchs—almost all men—amass obscene amounts of wealth and use it to reshape society in their image. It’s overt and unapologetic.
In February they erased Black History Month and Pride from our calendars, yesterday IWD was gone. Does that mean that LGBTQI people, and black history are erased? No.
Are we going to stop fighting for women’s rights? Immigrant rights? Disability rights? No. But it IS going to make life harder and the work more challenging.
We’re going to need to do things differently. We need a counterattack that has new players and new strategies.
People are frozen right now—unsure of what to do or say. We are working with so many clients and partners whose voices, influence and resources are so important in this moment, being forced into silence as a means of survival. We’re having to help leaders figure out a whole new strategy for how they show up. figuring out your values and purpose in this moment is critical. When the macro feels too big to change, we need to refocus on the micro. Establish the parameters of where you can and cannot go. What are the actions I can take, however small to unlock progress. We need to get creative in how we use our power, voice and connections to fight back.
Arts and Culture have always been a partner in this work. I believe business is one of the biggest untapped opportunities we have.
Today, politics is marketing. The far-right isn’t just spending aggressively—they own the platforms and control the algorithms that shape discourse. They have built a multi-billion-dollar electoral marketing complex that disconnects politics from real people and their lives. It’s working. Not just in the US. AFD, Germany’s far right political movement has gained unprecedented growth, reform is coming for us in the UK. These groups are using fear and disinformation to divide us and then use policy to install that division into our systems. People don’t respond to policy—they respond to values.
Our values are what move us. They drive action. They shape culture. I believe marketing is the most powerful tool we have to embed those values into the public consciousness. Ad spend is projected to hit $1 trillion this year. If we direct even a fraction of that toward social change—toward shaping narratives, influencing thinking, and mobilizing action—the impact would be profound.
I leave you with this: my partners and I, the women you see dotted around this room. We didn’t come together by accident. When Goli and I started Comotion we had no money, and in a failure of communications ended up getting pregnant at the exact same time. Building a business in that moment shouldn’t have been feasible – but we did it. We had to be creative in how we did things. We had little option but to normalise breastfeeding on calls and giving time off for the occasional mental breakdown. The same year we held WID we also nearly merged with another business, broken from 3 years of building something on a salary of £20K with toddlers that don’t sleep, and with this new world of opportunity ahead of us thanks to WID, we were spent and the offer of a higher salary and someone else to make the business decisions was tempting. After months of courting, the offer came in at £1 and we had to fire all our staff.
So that was an easier decision. Overnight we doubled our salaries and agreed if we couldn’t sustain it, this wasn’t a working model. One year later we hired Leanne, the year after that we started going through our networks and hiring the women who we considered magnificent in their work. Between us we have built a community of activists, strategists, campaigners, creatives, leaders from across industries and based all over the world. People committed to social change and who use their voice, power and influence to shift policy, move money differently, and mobilise action. Many of them are in this room today. Everyone in this room is a disruptor, and Comotion exists because we know that change happens when disruption is organised and strategic. I am so grateful to so many people in this room today for what we already achieved, and I am so excited despite how shit everything is to be in community with you all and figure out what we do next.
Thank you.
