The Case for Thinking Bigger, Not Smaller 

In 2025, the United States Government dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and restructured its foreign assistance, terminating roughly $76 billion in programs. U.S. foreign assistance overall is about 30% less than it was during the Biden Administration. For sexual and reproductive health, the shock was seismic: prior to 2025, the U.S. had supplied more than 40 percent of global donor funding for family planning. Within the last year, the International Planned Parenthood Federation counted nearly 1,400 clinics closed and 9 million people cut off from care. Modeling published in The Lancet projects that ending U.S. contraceptive support alone could mean 40 to 55 million more unintended pregnancies by 2030. That is the ground on which we now stand. And the understandable instinct across those of us engaged in narrative and social and behavior change, as I experienced in many conversations in June at the field’s largest gathering in Panama, is to survive by doing more with less. 

I think the opposite is true. This is not the moment to think smaller. It is the moment to think bigger, and to be honest about what bigger now demands of us. 

Let’s start with a problem the field rarely names out loud. As my colleague Natalia Cereser, who leads our impact entertainment work, put it in Panama, the last “C” in social and behavior change communications (SBCC) – communication itself – is still treated as a delivery channel rather than a strategic force with its own logic, culture, and reach. Too often, the media industry isn’t in the room. We bolt behavior-change frameworks onto media landscapes we do not actually inhabit, and those landscapes are moving faster than our frameworks can follow. Nearly 6 billion people are now online, most of them watching on-demand and mobile-first, on platforms that did not exist when some of our models were written. That is where beliefs and norms are formed today. Meeting that world takes sophisticated, entrenched media fluency. 

For PMC, thinking bigger has meant deep discussions and input from across sectors. Partnering with influential media entities has been part of our portfolio for years, but we have now made it our way of working. We have stopped producing our own dramas and have committed instead to putting our science behind partners who already own the screens. We had to look carefully at where we create the most value and how we can have the biggest impact. The networks, studios, and creators who live inside the attention economy every day are simply better at production, broadcast, and promotion than we will ever be. Our collaboration with Televisa and Univision on Papás por Conveniencia (“Conveniently a Family”) last year reached millions of viewers—reach we could not have manufactured on our own. Our partners do what they do best. We do what we do best: the formative research to understand how the audience feels about specific issues, the behavior-change science, the sexual and reproductive health and rights partnerships, the ecosystem around the show that drives conversations and connects people to resources, and the rigorous evaluation to see whether it made a difference. It’s our job to turn a hit show into a measurable catalyst for change in people’s lives. 

The current context is forcing all of us to understand what we’re good at, be honest about what we are not, and find ways to work with sharp partners and leverage what already exists. My blunt version of the lesson, and I do not think it is too strong: the organizations that learn to collaborate and co-create will come through this transition. If you do not meaningfully learn where and how to partner, you will not. 

I was struck in Panama by how ready the field is for this pivot. Collaboration has long been a word we put in proposals, but this time it felt different. An openness born out of shared hardship and genuine necessity to work differently.  

I also left with a concern, and an opportunity revolving around cultural narrative. There was not enough talk of changing narratives – the work of shifting the stories a society tells itself about current realities and what’s possible. The movements working to roll back reproductive rights understood long ago that norms are won or lost at the level of story, and they have resourced that conviction accordingly. The reproductive-rights organization Ipas describes an anti-rights movement that is now “increasingly well-coordinated and extremely well-funded,” aiming its sharpest blows at gender equality and reproductive health. Live Action, as one example, reaches 40 million people a month and has amassed more than 2.5 billion video views – distributing polished, emotionally engineered content that Ipas documents as broadcasting disinformation about women’s health to a massive young audience. 

This field was built on a radical belief: that the stories people tell themselves can change, about what’s true, what’s possible, what’s achievable. Acting on it now takes more than conviction. It takes the humility to partner, the discipline to do only what we do best, and the nerve to think bigger precisely when everything facing us suggests doing less. We have the science and the evidence. With the right partners, we have the reach. The future is still ours to shape. Let’s not cede the narrative.