Keeping humanitarian SRHR front and center & building the next generation of voices
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The International Conference on Family Planning is one of the largest global gatherings in the field — and a crowded one. Family planning in stable settings, climate, financing, and youth health all compete for attention. For advocates working on SRHR in conflict and crisis settings, staying visible in that environment is itself a strategic challenge. Women and girls in countries facing conflict can easily become a footnote in a conference that has a lot of other things to talk about.
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As Co-chair of the ICFP 2025 Humanitarian and Crisis Settings Subcommittee, I served as the content and communications focal point for a global network of SRHR implementers, researchers, advocates, and youth. This meant writing all strategic messaging, talking points, and website content, and shaping how the subcommittee told its story to the broader conference and field.
A central part of the approach was intentional: to actively recruit younger professionals and emerging advocates to take the stage rather than defaulting to established voices. I worked with them to develop messages and created opportunities for them to present on the ICFP main stage in Bogotá — because building the next generation of humanitarian SRHR advocates is as important as winning the argument today.
I also engaged in cross-subcommittee collaboration with the Environment & Climate Change Subcommittee, building new bridges between the humanitarian and climate communities — resulting in the Hotspots pre-conference and report.
Following the conference, the momentum continued with a LinkedIn-based Community of Practice on SRHR, Humanitarian Crises, and Climate Action — developing moderator guidance, onboarding materials, and facilitation prompts. The CoP secured 125+ members within two days of launch.
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Humanitarian SRHR stayed front and center at ICFP 2025 — not as a side conversation but as a main stage priority. Emerging advocates who had never before spoken at a global conference delivered compelling, well-crafted arguments to an international audience. And the field now has a sustained, cross-sector community of practice that keeps the conversation alive between conferences — connecting researchers, practitioners, donors, and governments who rarely engage in sustained dialogue despite working toward the same goals.
Co-creating tools that communities actually use — from South Sudan to Pakistan
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Family planning is too often treated as a development-time priority — something to address once a crisis has passed. In countries facing chronic conflict, climate shocks, and displacement, that approach leaves millions of women and girls without access to lifesaving reproductive health care. Changing it requires more than technical guidance from the outside; it requires building the advocacy capacity of the people closest to the problem.
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As Deputy Project Director on PROPEL Adapt — a five-year, $44M USAID project on SRHR policy, advocacy, financing, and governance across crisis-prone countries — I designed and led co-creation processes that brought together the full stakeholder spectrum: Ministry of Health officials, civil society leaders, UN agencies, international NGOs, and community health workers.
In South Sudan, I convened these actors to jointly develop SRHR advocacy objectives, messages, and tools for integrating family planning into emergency preparedness policy. I used SMART Advocacy methodology and role-play exercises with Ministry officials to help participants stress-test their arguments and shape materials they owned and would actually use. Those outputs were incorporated into PROPEL Adapt's global FP/RH Resilience Advocacy Toolkit.
In Pakistan, I expanded the approach to include community health workers — conducting listening sessions to understand their barriers to engaging in preparedness planning, then co-creating a training curriculum that drew on validated frameworks from the Community Health Impact Coalition and Women's Refugee Commission. I co-facilitated the training with a local trainer, grounding it in the conviction that primary health care is the foundation of health system resilience and that community health workers are essential advocates for that vision — not just service providers.
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Community health workers trained through the Pakistan curriculum went on to participate directly in a government dialogue on climate policy revision — advocating for the needs of women and girls in local communities. In South Sudan, government officials made concrete commitments to integrate SRHR into emergency preparedness planning, including budget allocation for reproductive health in humanitarian responses. The co-created tools are now in use by advocates well beyond the two countries where they were developed.
Holding teams together while the work — and the organization — keeps changing
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The organizations delivering essential health services to people in crisis are not immune to crisis themselves. Layoffs, leadership transitions, structural reorganizations, and funding uncertainty can fracture the teams doing the most important work — at exactly the moments when those teams need to be most functional. Leading through that kind of institutional instability requires a particular kind of presence: someone who can hold the space for honesty, keep the day-to-day work moving, and make sure the people closest to the mission don't lose sight of why it matters.
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At IPPF, I stepped in as Interim Humanitarian Director during a period of significant structural change — the organization was moving its humanitarian team's headquarters and bringing in new team members, all while COVID-19 had dispersed staff across time zones and cut off the in-person connection that holds teams together. I provided consistent remote leadership across four regions, steadied a team navigating simultaneous external and internal uncertainty, and worked to amplify the humanitarian program's work to senior leaders and donors — making the case that this work was not a peripheral function but vital to IPPF's overall mission.
At the International Rescue Committee, I served as a trusted bridge between staff and senior leadership during a period of significant organizational upheaval — navigating layoffs, having the hard individual conversations with team members, and advocating upward with evidence and clarity for the strategic importance of SRHR to IRC's mission. I reconstituted the team through strategic hiring and helped make the case that this work was not peripheral but central — supporting it with the data, stories, and strategic framing that aligned donors and senior leaders around its value.
At ICFP, I supported a third kind of transition: helping a volunteer subcommittee of global SRHR advocates — many of them simultaneously navigating the collapse of USAID funding and the loss of programs they had built over years — find their footing, step into new roles, and deliver at a major global conference. I established the rhythms, communications, and shared clarity that allowed the subcommittee to function effectively despite the uncertainty each member was carrying.
Across all three, the work was the same at its core: listening carefully to the people who were struggling, advocating upward for the importance of their work, and creating the conditions for teams to do their best even when everything around them felt unstable.
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At IPPF, the humanitarian team maintained continuity of SRHR service delivery across four regions through one of the most disruptive periods in recent memory — and emerged with its mission more clearly articulated and better positioned within the organization. At IRC, the team's domain grew significantly in the years following the period of upheaval — through strategic fundraising supported by the evidence and stories developed to align leadership and donors. At ICFP, the subcommittee delivered record humanitarian representation at the 2025 conference, with emerging advocates taking the main stage and a new community of practice launching to sustain the work beyond the conference itself.