By Pumza Marabulela & Aphiwe Mame.
A Conversation With Kashifa Ancer (AMC Alumni, Cohort 7), Project Lead for Rethink Your Drink, on Advocacy, Storytelling and Sustainable Social Change
Kashifa laughs as she describes her two-year-old daughter picking up a laptop and announcing to the room that she is “in a meeting”.
It is a small moment, but one that captures the season she currently finds herself in: busy, shifting, demanding — but deeply energising. Somewhere between motherhood, movement-building and national campaigning, Kashifa has stepped into a new phase of leadership.
Across the NGO sector, communications teams are increasingly being asked to do far more than “raise awareness.” They are expected to build trust, shape public conversation, mobilise communities, and translate complex social realities into stories people can emotionally connect with.
But many organisations still treat communication as the final step, the poster at the end of the project. The reality is that communication is strategy.
These questions emerged during a recent conversation with Kashifa, an DG Murray Trust Amplify Mobilise Change (AMC) alum whose work in Alcohol Harm Reduction advocacy since 2024, offers powerful insight into what the future of impact communication could look like.
“People often think communication is the poster at the end.”
Q: What drew you into alcohol harm reduction work specifically?
Kashifa: Initially, my involvement was professional. I was working within the DG Murray Trust environment and supporting different portfolios. Later, while on maternity leave, I applied almost impulsively for an opportunity to lead the campaign — a late-night decision that would eventually reshape how I understood communication and advocacy.
But over time, the work became deeply personal because you start recognising how alcohol harm exists around us socially, culturally, and within families and communities.
The turning point came during one of my weekly Wednesday reading sessions. As I researched alcohol advertising trends locally and globally, a pattern became impossible to ignore: the deliberate targeting of young Black people.
In a country shaped by inequality, unemployment, and the lingering wounds of apartheid, alcohol is not simply being sold as a product. It is often sold as celebration, belonging, aspiration, escape — even survival.
“That set me off,” she reflects.
What began as a professional responsibility became something much deeper. It forced her to confront difficult questions about who profits from alcohol consumption, who carries the burden of alcohol-related harm, and why communities already facing significant social and economic challenges continue to be aggressively marketed to.
One of the things that became important to me was understanding that alcohol harm reduction is not simply about telling people to stop drinking. It’s about systems, trauma, violence, economics, and public health.
There’s an important lesson here for the broader NGO sector.
Too often, advocacy communication becomes trapped in moral messaging: campaigns built around blame, shame, or simplistic ideas of “good” and “bad” behaviour. But audiences today are deeply aware of structural realities. They know inequality, violence, unemployment, and economic stress shape everyday life. Communication that ignores this complexity often fails because communities already understand it intimately.
Increasingly, AMC’s work with civil society organisations has centred exactly this challenge: helping NGOs move beyond awareness campaigns toward audience-centred communication rooted in trust, strategy, and lived realities.
“The public already understands complexity.”
Q: What are some of the communication challenges that come with alcohol harm reduction advocacy?
Kashifa: One challenge is avoiding overly simplistic messaging. If communication becomes too judgmental, people disengage. You need to create understanding rather than condemnation.
Another challenge is helping people understand that alcohol harm is connected to broader systems and social realities.
We wanted people to pause and rethink, not shut down.
That philosophy has shaped the tone and approach of the Rethink Your Drink campaign. Rather than relying solely on statistics, warnings, or fear-based messaging, the campaign seeks to create space for reflection and conversation. It invites people to examine their relationship with alcohol and the social norms surrounding it without feeling attacked or judged.
This insight feels particularly urgent in today’s digital environment.
Audiences no longer engage with organisations as passive recipients of information. They compare narratives across platforms, interpret messaging through lived experience, and increasingly value authenticity over polished institutional language.
The organisations succeeding online are often those willing to sound more human. Not less professional, more socially aware, conversational, and emotionally intelligent.
That requires NGOs to understand platform culture properly. A LinkedIn audience is not an Instagram audience. WhatsApp communities behave differently from TikTok audiences. Communication today requires cultural literacy as much as technical skill.
“Advocacy work cannot survive without community.”
Q: Advocacy work can be emotionally heavy. How do you sustain yourself within this work?
Kashifa: Community matters. Support systems matter. You cannot do this work alone.
I also think it’s important to remember that social change is often incremental. Sometimes the work is simply creating conversations, shifting understanding slowly, and helping people think differently over time.
This may be one of the most important lessons for the impact sector right now.
Digital culture rewards speed, visibility, and constant output. Funders often want measurable impact quickly. Organisations feel pressure to always be “on.” But social transformation rarely moves at the pace of the algorithm.
Behaviour change, trust-building, and community mobilisation require sustained engagement over time. Which is why many organisations are beginning to rethink the relationship between communication and community-building. The two are increasingly inseparable.
Strong communication is not simply broadcasting information. It is listening. It is participation. It is creating spaces where people feel recognised and included.
Beyond awareness
Kashifa’s reflections ultimately point to a bigger shift happening across the NGO sector.
Communication is no longer peripheral work. It is movement work.
In a fragmented digital environment where trust is unstable and attention is scarce, organisations are being challenged to communicate with greater humanity, sharper strategy, and deeper cultural understanding.
The question is no longer whether communication matters. The question is whether organisations are willing to treat communication as seriously as the social change they claim to pursue
‘Hope lives in the conversation’
Q: What gives you hope?
Kashifa: I think what gives me hope is seeing people willing to have the conversation. We often assume people don’t care, but when you create space for honest dialogue, people engage. They reflect. They share their experiences.
Social change doesn’t always happen through one big breakthrough. Sometimes it happens through small shifts — a conversation, a different perspective, a question someone starts asking themselves.
That’s why I still believe communication matters. Not because it has all the answers, but because it can help us imagine something different. It can help us see that the things we’ve normalised don’t have to stay normal.
As our conversation comes to a close, it becomes clear that Kashifa’s work is not simply about alcohol harm reduction. It is about expanding what people believe is possible — for themselves, their communities, and the systems they inhabit. In a world quick to blame individuals for collective problems, her work reminds us that change begins by asking better questions, telling more honest stories, and creating space for people to rethink what they have been taught to accept.
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