Reflections on Trust

By Malka Ranjana Kopell

As I sit and reflect at the end of a very long election, just days after a new president has been elected, I am moved to think about trust.

There has been lots of talk about trust lately — or more accurately, about its loss. Loss of trust in our leaders. Loss of trust in government. Loss of trust in our democratic process. Loss of trust in each other.

My organization, Civity, supports connection and trust-building through conversation across societal divides. So I was excited recently to have the opportunity to spend some time really focusing on trust as part of a PACE “Imagination Sprint.” Each PACE Sprint brings about a dozen people together to discuss and reflect on a timely topic of pivotal importance.

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from an imagination sprint about trust. As it turned out, the materials and the conversation with my Sprint colleagues spurred me to new perspectives and new questions.

Trust and Relationships

At Civity, our trust-building process aims high: we aim for culture change. Our culture, like all cultures, is based on relationships, positive and negative, close and not-so-close. Civity helps people create the space to build positive relationships based on respect and empathy. As positive relationships grow, even if those relationships are not-so-close, trust also grows. If a relationship is between two people who are different from each other, the connection and trust-building are transformative.

Civity convenes gatherings where people engage with each other in one-on-one conversations. People tell — and listen to — each others’ stories. Often these conversations call people to share experiences with and across social power divides such as race, class, country of origin. In these conversations, trust is tested — and built right away. “Did you create a safe space for me to tell my story? Did I tell my story honestly? Did you listen? Do I really see you? Do you see me?”

The Imagination Sprint pushed me to consider aspects of trust I hadn’t thought about before. At one level, everyone thinks trust is a good thing: “Yeah, of course we should have more trust in our society.” But the more we talked about trust in the Sprint, nuances began to appear.

Trust Has to Be Earned — And It Ain’t the Same for Everybody

One important point that came out of our Sprint discussions was that trust is earned. People don’t just magically trust each other. In order to trust someone, people need to think they are worthy of that trust. And there are different levels of trust. Some people we trust with our lives or with our kids. Other people we trust to be good neighbors.

Several participants in the Sprint pointed out that people in our society enjoy different perceived levels of trustworthiness. Race, for example, plays an important role for many in determining whether someone is deemed worthy of others’ trust. The stories of police brutality and persecution of African-American men and women show that not everybody gets an equal “benefit of the doubt.” Similarly, support — or lack of support — for policies or programs even perceived to be based on race (as well as on immigration status, or socioeconomic class) can signal different levels of trust in those groups.

Of course, trust goes both ways. People who are marginalized by society also trust society less; they find society in general to be less than trustworthy. One Sprint participant, who is a person of color, talked about being on the other side of a door when he was interrupted in the middle of the night by a police officer (who turned out later to be at the wrong apartment). Did that person trust enough to want to open the door? Certainly not.

Social Change vs. Institutional Change

As the Sprint discussions progressed, I felt challenged. Is generating a culture of trust among individuals enough? Or should we be changing institutions and policies to make them more trustworthy?

After all, people shouldn’t trust their government if the government is screwing them over. People shouldn’t trust a person in power if that person wants to hurt them.

Is putting people in relationship enough to generate trust?

I emerged from our discussions, however, with a strong conviction that this perceived tension is actually a “both-and.” Many of our policies and programs need to change, to be more inclusive, to be made fairer, and to help rather than hurt. But they won’t change by magic. They won’t change without people supporting those policy changes.

In our country, change emerges from the people. The people elect representatives. Through their choices of electeds and sometimes in more direct ways (as in my “direct democracy” state of California), the people show their support for policies and programs.

Often, people support — or don’t support — policies depending on who those policies benefit… what does that tell us about trust? In this most recent California election, the initiative to reverse the ban on affirmative action by the state lost. A tax measure to bring more money to public schools is failing. I’ve seen affordable housing projects killed because citizens with influence didn’t want to live next door to “those people.”

We elect representatives and leaders who support “us.” And we often disapprove of policies that support “them.” The “us” and the “them” are defined by how we see our society and who we consider to be part of it. Policies to ground and grow more expansive mutual trust require a more inclusive “we.” For that, we need to change culture.

Some people do not trust our institutions, our programs, or our policies because those institutions, policies, and programs have not proven to be trustworthy. This needs to change.

Building more trust between people — culture change — is necessary for these policy changes to happen.

Malka Ranjana Kopell is Co-Founder and CEO of Civity (www.civity.org), a national nonprofit organization focused on fostering relationships of respect and empathy across divides of race, class and culture. Civity supports community leaders, organizations and institutions that recognize first-hand the need for people to have a more inclusive understanding of who belongs to their community. Civity works primarily through (1) training/skill-building/practice in connecting through difference and (2) communicating a story of connection to counter the story of division that often prevails today.

Malka has more than 30 years’ experience helping people work together in community. In 1990 she founded the consulting organization Community Focus to facilitate more effective implementation of public policies by increasing community participation. She also served as a program officer for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, developing and managing grants in the areas of conflict resolution and civic engagement. Malka was the founding managing director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University, and is currently a senior mediator/facilitator with the Program on Consensus and Collaboration at California State University, Sacramento.

Malka holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University.