There's a truth I keep coming back to in my work with mission-driven organizations: you can't market your way out of a mess.

What I mean is this: You can't rely solely on surface-level marketing and communication tactics to fix problems that are rooted somewhere deeper in your organization. No amount of polished messaging will close the gap between what you say and what you actually do.

But here's where it gets interesting: You absolutely can leverage marketing to steer you where you want to go – as long as you're willing to look under the hood of your other business systems and do the harder work of alignment.

As mission-driven organizations grow and evolve, the systems that served them in earlier stages often fail to scale alongside their aspirations – creating widening gaps between what they say, and what they do.

This is usually just due to the fact that smaller organizations don’t have the capacity or the in-house expertise to focus deeply on designing their internal operations. It makes sense – most of their bandwidth will rightly be spent on their core service, product, or external mission because that’s how and why they exist.

RESILIENCE is one of the few ideas I can hold tight to right now, which means it’s something that needs attention and nurturing. So let’s keep pulling the thread on what it means for us – as individual humans, as organizations, and as a community – at this moment in time.

But first let me be clear about what I do not mean by resilience: hustling more, ignoring our feelings and fears and just pushing through, or virtually anything that is not on the side of liberation.