In episode 14 of The Comms Collective, I sat down with Christopher Horn, Director of Communications at the States United Democracy Center, for a conversation about career pivots, calm leadership, and why trust — not AI — is the real story shaping the future of communications.

Chris didn’t set out to work in nonprofit comms. He went to university planning to study microbiology, switched to journalism after a rough first semester of chemistry, and set his sights on magazines during the golden age of long-form print. His dream job was features editor at W Magazine. Then the Great Recession hit the year he graduated, magazines stopped hiring, and a role he’d built years toward simply wasn’t there anymore.

What came next is the part of his story I think most comms professionals will recognise. A chance call from a public policy foundation in New York — whose comms director happened to know the internship programme Chris had come through — led to a job title that sounds almost quaint now: “multimedia web intern.” It was his way in to nonprofit communications, and seventeen years later, he’s still there, having led comms at C40 Cities, the Council of State Governments Justice Center, and now States United. His takeaway: the core skills of journalism — writing to inform, raising awareness, engaging an audience — turned out to be far more portable than he expected.

We talked about the campaign he’s proudest of: the 2022 C40 World Mayors Summit, where he led media strategy, digital content and main-stage programming for an event bringing together more than 100 mayors from around the world, all under one theme, “United in Action.” Getting there took what he called “putting puzzle pieces together” — understanding what each city cared about, what the organisation needed, and finding the thread that connected them.

That balancing act — big ambition, limited resources — came up again and again. Chris’s reframe is one I’ll be borrowing: constraints are lanes, not boxes. A box has four walls you can’t get past. A lane is narrower, but you can still move forward in it. Zero budget doesn’t mean zero strategy. It just changes the production value, not the quality of the thinking behind it.

On leadership, he described his style as collaborative, with elements of coaching and mentoring — motivating people through recognition and through deliberate, achievable challenge. In a crisis, his instinct is to slow down before speaking: understand who’s saying what and where the real reputational risk sits, before deciding how to respond. As he put it, a leader’s energy is contagious — if you’re frantic, your team absorbs that, and the work suffers for it.

We also spent time on where he thinks comms needs to go next. Not AI — a subject he deliberately steered away from, because he thinks the conversation defaults there too easily. Instead, he pointed to two things: tackling misinformation head-on as part of annual strategy rather than only reacting to it, and the rise of “new media” — podcasts and trusted community voices — as a way to rebuild confidence that’s been lost in institutions and legacy outlets. Long-form conversation, he argued, builds trust in a way a soundbite never can, because people can actually hear who you are.

The conversation closed on something more personal: a year of unemployment before States United, and the mindset shift that came out of it. “I don’t want my dream to be my job,” he told me. “I want my dream to be who I am.” It’s advice worth sitting with, whether you’re early in your career or seventeen years in.

Listen to the full conversation with Christopher Horn on episode 14 of The Comms Collective, wherever you get your podcasts.

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