RYTHM Foundation was at Davos 2026, where the conversations that matter most often happen in the margins.
While heads of state and CEOs filled the main halls of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, a different kind of leadership gathered at the WIN Lounge by Women Inspiring Network. Here, the currency wasn’t market share or policy leverage—it was something harder to quantify: the power of narrative to reshape how we think about change.
Datin Sri Umayal Eswaran, Chairperson of RYTHM Foundation, joined a panel curated by WIN that asked a deceptively simple question: in an age where everyone is trying to tell stories about impact, whose stories are actually being heard?
The session—Impact Is Influence: Storytelling, Philanthropy & Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century—was held in the WIN Lounge on the sidelines of the annual meeting and brought together Radhika Bharat Ram of Shri Ram School and KARM for Young Indians, and Karen Spencer, co-chair of Catalyst Now, alongside Datin Sri Umayal.
Moderated by Ayesha Javed, Senior Editor at TIME, the conversation cut through the noise of Davos to wrestle with something more fundamental: the responsibility that comes with the microphone.
When Data Isn’t Enough
Datin Sri Umayal opened with a provocation that landed quietly but firmly: “Storytelling is not a branding exercise. It’s a listening practice.”
For someone who has spent two decades steering a global corporate foundation, from the Himalayan mountains to Malaysia’s indigenous communities, from Ghana’s coastal towns to Sri Lanka’s villages, she’s seen what happens when impact narratives prioritize polish over proximity.
“Data plays a critical role,” she acknowledged. “But numbers alone rarely tell the whole story. They miss the trade-offs families make, the invisible burdens communities carry, the forms of resilience that cannot be easily quantified.”
The room leaned in. In a place like Davos, where metrics and dashboards dominate, this felt like necessary pushback.
“The real work begins when you’re willing to sit with the complexities behind the data,” Umayal continued. Responsible storytelling, she argued, requires patience, humility, and what philanthropy doesn’t always make time for: proximity to people’s lived experiences.
Respect as a Non-negotiable
The conversation then turned to power—specifically, who has it, and what they do with it.
Datin Sri Umayal didn’t mince words: “We must respect the struggles of beneficiaries. This work is not about how good our impact looks. It’s about understanding realities on the ground, without using them to validate ourselves.”
It was a pointed challenge to an entire industry that often measures success by how compelling the stories it tells about others can be.
She went further: “We are not ‘their voice.’ We are enablers—supporting people and communities to amplify their voice, on their terms, in their language, and with their agency intact.”
This distinction, enabler versus spokesperson, reframed the entire premise of philanthropic storytelling. It suggested that influence isn’t about how loudly you can speak on behalf of others, but whether you’re creating the conditions for others to be heard at all.
Where Narrative Meets Action
By the session’s close, a shared understanding had emerged: influence today is built where narrative and action travel together.
Storytelling without accountability risks becoming performance. Data without humanity creates distance. But when rigor and respect, metrics and meaning, are held together—when the numbers are grounded in names, and the strategy is shaped by listening—social impact has the potential to endure.
The WIN Lounge at Davos 2026 hosted leaders from technology, business, arts, hospitality, and social impact throughout the week. But this panel stood out for what it refused to do: simplify, sanitize, or sell.
Instead, it offered something rarer. A conversation about how storytelling can become an act of respect, how philanthropy can be practised with humility, and how influence, when wielded carefully, can become a force for lasting change.
RYTHM Foundation is grateful to Women Inspiring Network for creating a space that allowed for nuance, honesty, and thoughtful dialogue.
Because in a world saturated with stories about impact, the question isn’t just what we’re telling, it’s how we’re listening.
