'Let the work speak, not the awards'

At the e4m DoGood Summit and Awards 2025, Sunil Kumar, President of e4m and Co-Jury Chair, delivered a grounded and insightful reflection on what it truly means to “do good” in the communication and social impact space.

Kumar began by expressing gratitude to the team and especially to Dr. Anurag Batra for the opportunity. “More important for us is that it's also a learning process—for the students, for all of us. A lot of things happening in the country—especially under new government plans—we don't always fully understand because we don’t have access to all the information. But the moment you engage in processes like this, you really begin to see how things are happening on the ground.”

He stressed that the true merit of a campaign or initiative lies not in its intent to win awards but in its ability to speak for itself. “There are two ways of doing it,” he said. “One is that you talk about the work. The other is that the work talks about you. The most important part is: the work needs to talk about it.”

As a communications consultant and an alumnus of IIMC, Kumar reminisced about the foundational ethics he was taught. “Back then, there was a chapter called ‘Ethics in Journalism’. We were told you don’t need to show blood, or skin, or name names to make a point. That value-based journalism meant everything. And many of us from communication backgrounds are still waiting for that honest journalism to return.”

Kumar also offered a powerful reminder of the real stakeholders in social impact work—the communities. “In the social space, in doing good, the biggest component, the biggest doer, is the people. We exist because of millions who give us a chance to enter their lives, to experiment—even fail—at their cost. If we don’t do the job right, they are the ones who lose the most, not us.”

The jury process, he noted, was not without its own learning curve. “Initially we thought we wouldn’t need to vote. We thought, ‘We’re good people, we’ll reach consensus.’ But the debates were so rich and layered that, in half the cases, we actually needed to vote.”

Ultimately, Kumar’s message was a call for accountability, humility, and genuine intent in the world of impact-driven communication. “Let’s not do the work to win an award. The award is just a recognition. Let the work speak for itself.”