How Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna is leading her aid org in the face of Trump’s cuts

After the trump management was cutting the foreign assistance, two-thirds of the Mercy Corps, US-funded programs were canceled. CEO Tjada d’Oyen McKenna has found new ways to find new ways to help them in need of helping them to capture the leading parts of his team, in a great pressure. McKenna, in Gaza, tells us what a group of assistance workers hears from the group and why he does not escape to work, but embracing him. As many working leaders living in political or economic variability, McKenna encounters a complex conundrum: fight, flight or frost.

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The US government’s financing was half of your finances, does it?

Exactly.

Two-thirds of your programs have been canceled. I want to say that this is like a selecial crisis, a real crisis for the organization. So what did you do? I want to say that you were in all of the emergency decisions.

They made emergency decisions and should say that I was very ugly, isn’t it? Usually working with the government, there are definitions for everything, a very special definition for a very special definition or ice cream. And in this situation, the management was not there. We have to stop doing everything, our first concern was security for people. If I have a landing area of ​​a country or in a remote area of ​​a country or a school feeding program, they did not show that this community did not show the next day, and this did not tell us the US government, but we had to go to work.

We had to be cut off or how clear things that will be cut or cut, in 40 different countries, these programs to close this program. We combined some of our regions, we closed some country’s controls. We should just work to say, “If finance is not there for this program, we will connect it with the US government to see if we can move, and if another hurricane or earthquake occurs.”

I want to say that the mockery is to respond to the crisis, and now the crisis is to you. Some of these communities in some ways you create a crisis because they are used to being there.

Yes, yes, yes. And especially, especially, especially for the people we have the opportunity, especially worried about much in the distant places, especially in the distant places, and I am very worried about what we are facing me. We received a report from his colleagues of civil servants, and tried to make sure that the director of his countries would pay before everyone went. My workers in Sudan have moved almost all of their homes. Thus, we are working for us in temporary shelters, and still pass the same problems.

Thus, this was a strange situation in our organization to be an emergency patient, but we knew. . . You felt guilty to feel almost bad because people are so bad than you do. There was a very strange mental gymnastics that happened for all of us.

Now for months, we have passed this initial shock. How much do you look like in 2025 in 2025, do you look like Mercy Corps, a new type of normal type for USAID Orgs? If you catch your breath in a hope, “Will the next leadership restore things?”

No, we do not know that there is nothing, but we do not know exactly what it is going. The other thing in the surreal was this sexual coordination or demonization of this assistance agency. Many wrong information about what we do and how we do it. And then there is the third and fourth effect. Thus, in many places, we trust in certain areas and outside the UN planes, and therefore we face the same US in the United States. So we are still digging from later results. We know that the world is changed and is currently being accepted and trying to take it to the future while the future is still very uncertain.

I have to ask you about Gaza. In Gaza, there are all reports in the teams in the teams. The second-east director attacked the initial military operation of the October 7 attack of Hamas in October 2023. Are your teams active in place there yet? What do they see and what do they say about the news of our listeners?

There are about 35 employees living in Gaza. There are 1,300 trucks stuck in a border that cannot access. At that time, we have finished dishes in these trucks. And without these trucks, our teams in the ground, we provide clean water with clean water by working with water descourability plants. It is very bad right now. Our team members are hungry. They are concerned about where the next meal comes from. There is a member of a delegation, and he talks about the loss of weight loss in his colleagues. About a million people are in the orders of evacuation in Gaza. Many of them moved this fourth and fourth time.

What is concerned about what is recent, the thing that really worries us, the sense of hope really overturned. I think people feel like they are just stayed. This is always as tough as it is, and our employees are struggling to survive. We talk about the lack of food, but 95% of the household there are not enough water. Therefore, “Every day I’m a choice, I’m not covered with my hands? I just can’t imagine. It’s just awful and so powerless, especially when we know there are trucks waiting for the border, especially.

There are people like us, like my employees who want to do things, like those who want to eat like themselves and want to do business, we only know this stop the political will.

I talked to another humanitarian aid leader than the record, and I chose not to provide services in Gaza this year and believed that the efforts of Hamasses would inevitably leak. And obviously, this is the fact that the Israeli government or servicemen are at least one type of this, did you worry about this? Is this important when working to eat people?

Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world. I want to say that the United States has laws to fight terrorism. Our staff is checked. We check the names, we check the lists because it is too big to endure the risk of being a part of a staff member. We did not see the provocation of mass help from Hamas. This was not just our experience and most of our colleagues did not live this. Thus, it was spoken as a danger. You see that you are plundered, you see hungry people, each truck, and you see children and people in front of trucks. The way to steal or make food, eating people with food and then the way to flood with food, then is not valuable.

I think that more importantly, saying that they did not see the mass help, the authorities of the border body were anonymous Israeli defense forces in Cogat. US government reports, internal past USAID audit reports and assistance that there are no evidence of mass changes. Thus, we work in difficult environments and we all get very seriously, but we know how to do it. We know how to work in these environments.