What needs healing here?
Trust Lab’s Theory of Change
About Trust Labs
We support community stewards – members of a community who’ve claimed a stake in its wellbeing and possess both the desire and capacity to tend to it. We equip them with rigorous skills to navigate tough moments together and tools to build stronger, more connected relationships.
Often, that takes the form of building communities of practice among peers facing similar relational challenge-sets. We guide them through months- or years-long training and coaching to help them diagnose what’s happening and why, and to intervene in ways that thicken relationships and trust-building where it counts.
We consider ourselves a “think-and-do tank”: In rare cases, we work in direct partnership with those affected to build leaderful communities from scratch, in order to interrupt cycles of grief and isolation. This creates a feedback loop, giving us a view from the driver’s seat into the complications that attend community-building. That grist informs our teaching and curriculum development.
The Problem
As has been well-documented, we're living in an era marked by endemic loneliness and isolation, hyperpoliticization and polarization, and a rise in identity-based hate. The drivers are many and well-documented: a fragmented media landscape and a blurring of truth and fiction; shifting demographics, intersecting with long-standing histories of structural segregation and rising income inequality; technologies ostensibly meant to connect that too often fuel the opposite.
We remain in the midst of a cultural pendulum swing that left our relationships vulnerable to those forces. As we began shining a light on once tabooed topics, we reexamined the sanitized stories that left long histories of harm unacknowledged or unaddressed. We recognized, rightly, that we cannot heal what we cannot name. But in doing so, we came to believe that we could cancel or correct the people or experiences that feel uncomfortable, threatening, anger-inducing, or worthy of dismissal. We failed to pair truth-telling with reconciliation and reparative tools, and to recognize we cannot simply dispose of what we do not like.
The result is that our relational networks have dissolved and our relational skills have atrophied.
We’re locked in a negative feedback loop (which is only compounded by our growing attachment to AI companionship). Community is quite literally life-giving but it’s also a hot mess: When connection goes awry, as it often does, we retreat. Our social anxieties grow, and our skills diminish. We find ourselves more easily agitated by others’ actions and behaviors, and we retreat further. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to generate, let alone sustain, relationships.
The result is a crisis of disposability and mistrust. We assume the worst in one another, choosing to accuse first, discuss later. Our heightened antennae are primed to read everything as harm, which makes it difficult to differentiate between discomfort and harm. Our campuses and workplaces and congregations and family dinner tables erupt in accusations, as the toxicity of our social media feeds bleed into our private and public lives.
For those experiencing this fracture firsthand, the drivers don’t matter. The question is a simple one: How do I stop the bleeding?
Our strategy: Growing & equipping relationally skilled leaders
Nodes of connection – whether in the form of a beloved neighborhood or a congregation or a school community or simply a group of friends with staying power – invariably depend on culture-keepers: members of a community who claim a stake in its wellbeing and possess both the desire and the capacity to tend to it. They are people with a knack for bringing people together, and for growing and sustaining relationships. We like the term community stewards, but you can call them community-builders or weavers. Some of them are embedded in civic hubs; others derive their role or authority more informally. They are leaders, even as they might not always use that word.
While there are patterns that are driving relational erosion on a mass scale, the precise nature of what’s got us stuck – and indeed, the keys to ameliorating it – are almost always contextually specific and rooted in our cultural DNA. There is no one-size-fits-all, and most programmatic interventions tend to be fleeting or fall flat.
When it comes to addressing community issues, we believe that community leaders are their own best experts, and that solutions with staying power are often homegrown. We need community leaders who can navigate tricky moments, initiate and sustain authentic connective strategies, and know when to call for help.
You cannot address abstract issues like “polarization” or “belonging” in abstract terms. We therefore begin by looking for community stewards who are actively working to address a source of conflict or rupture, and helping them identify where mistrust and misunderstanding are getting them stuck.
Training & Leadership development
Our teaching rests on three core building blocks: diagnostic integrity, relational skill-building, and self-attunement.
It is anchored in adaptive leadership, a framework that equips participants to navigate through uncertainty, and to address the kind of relational challenges for which there can only be progress, rather than any single, enduring fix, and where that progress requires changing hearts, minds, and loyalties over time. It equips people to more effectively diagnose and take action on a given challenge, by imagining into the worlds of the people they are trying to mobilize in service of sustained change.
Diagnostic integrity
We begin by going to the source of the wound — working with partners to help them accurately diagnose what’s behind the relational ruptures they’re seeing or experiencing. We (and others) call that diagnostic integrity: one’s ability to accurately understand the problem at hand. Too often, our purported solutions are apt to chase the wrong problem: We see the issue only from a limited perspective, or we treat a symptom when we’d be served treating the cause. The result is a lot of wasted energy and effort spent attending to the wrong thing.
To start, we examine the places where persistent relational deficits – relationships that require repair or strengthening – are fueling other challenges. Where are existing relationships atrophied, ruptured, or functioning in unhealthy ways? Where are people not in relationship who should be? What needs immediate tending, and what will require time?
Making headway depends on identifying where you’re seeing entrenched resistance and why, disentangling perception from reality and understanding feelings and perspectives that are as deeply held as your own. It depends on determining where you have the authority, whether formal or informal, to do something about it and your limits, and with whom you’ll need to partner.
For example, a city government official or the head of a nonprofit service agency might notice that local residents aren’t using available essential services. Dig a little deeper, however, and they might discover that's the product of mistrust of authority. Or perhaps it's the product of chronic loneliness and isolation among a particular population, which can lead to further withdrawal. Or maybe it’s an issue of fragmentation among service providers, or the fact that the services fail to address acute needs. If you fail to see the problem as one of relational deficits, you might put your energy into marketing and outreach, supposing that the problem is one of visibility and accessibility, rather than trust. In other words: If you fail to exercise diagnostic integrity, you might treat the wrong problem.
Relational skill-building
From there, we can begin to develop the skills to move differently: learning to increase our own and others’ capacity for heat, and what to do when we’ve exceeded our thresholds for discomfort; interrupting moments of harm without resorting to blame or shame or putting someone on the defense, and the difference between constructive versus destructive tension; learning to ask better questions and the art of active listening; how to establish particular norms, and reparative practices when we inevitably deviate from them.
We believe that grief and conflict exist in a feedback loop: Untended grief begets conflict, which, left untended, begets grief. Interrupting that cycle and strengthening our civic fabric requires talking to each other — investing intentionally in the kinds of conversations that reveal us as complex and caring human beings. That almost always involves bringing people together in some way, which is why we also put an emphasis on bridge-building strategies and how to create containers for meaningful connection at differing degrees of depth.
Our training and coaching is informed by our experiences in the field: We are the co-creators of The Dinner Party and The People’s Supper. The first is a community of grieving young adults; the second is an approach and set of tools that has aided dozens of communities across the country. While vastly different both in design and end-goal, each one has brought together tens of thousands of people, both online and offline.
Our toolset, informed by those experiences, allows people to talk about the things that matter most. It helps participants with diverse identities and experiences move through their mistrust and misgivings, allowing them to share stories that provide the foundation for understanding and repair.
Self-attunement
But of course, our relationships with others are as much a story about “us” as they are about “them”. The third pillar of our teaching and practice thus asks the people we’re working with to go inward. Strengthening our relational skills requires deep work on self: understanding our triggers and activations and the voices we’re apt to listen to versus the ones we’re quick to tune out or discard. It requires self-examination, and a willingness to own what’s ours. It requires the ability to self-regulate, and to fend off burnout and compassion fatigue, and to resource yourself enough to stay in the work for the long-haul.
Building networks of practice
Just as loneliness and isolation can have a crippling effect on individual and communal wellbeing, the isolation that comes of leadership can drive burnout and disaffection.
That’s why we seek to build networks of practice: We conduct most of our training and coaching among cohorts of peers, working on similar-issue sets in different environments.
Connecting with peers across different institutions or environments has a normalizing effect: Over time, leaders discover they’re not alone, and have the opportunity to cross-pollinate, testing out strategies and tactics and sharing learnings with others who’ve been there. And the experience of learning as a group and deepening relationships over time means that participants can practice what they’re learning in real-time, exploring the conditions of their own belonging, experiencing what it means to be cared for or listened to or pushed, and coming face-to-face with experiences of discomfort or disagreement.
Where possible, we work to create bright spots within a network, through which principles and practices can easily spread among peers facing similar challenge-sets. We know we can’t work with every community experiencing breakage, so we seek out opportunities to share learnings and case studies across larger networks. We select for people and partners whose challenges are representative of a bigger set of issues affecting groups of peers, and look for opportunities to do lighter-touch training, resource-sharing, and storytelling across medium- and large-scale networks.
Coaching
We add to that coaching and accompaniment, to which we bring more than 15 years spent testing and iterating different approaches to deepening social connection and social cohesion at scale. We use our breadth of expertise to help clients, partners, and cohort members determine which tools and approaches are best suited to their particular goals.
Creating Peer-Driven Communities of Care at Scale
(Caption: This is what we mean by “do-tank”.)
Finally, in addition to offering trainings and consulting services, we also take on a limited body of work where we can actively sit in the builder’s seat: cultivating deep, peer-driven communities of care at scale, where they’re needed most.
Just as polarization is difficult to address in the abstract, so, too, is loneliness. We believe that buried beneath our most isolating experiences lie the seeds for rich community, empathy, and meaningful connection. That’s why we choose to focus on shared pain-points: We’ve consistently found that the subjects and experiences that leave us feeling most alone can lead to some of our most generative conversations and relationships. We’ve proven that among young adults who have experienced significant loss; in communities riven by politics; in schools traumatized by the loss of a student; among parents and families acutely impacted by internet harm.
These partnerships are bespoke by design; to be effective, they must be responsive to the scope and nature of the community at hand. We help our partners develop and oversee community management teams and systems, which touch on everything from back-end infrastructure to member support.
Here, too, leadership development is key: For the role of community managers, we enlist peers rather than professionals, recognizing that lived experience affords a level of credibility and insight that can’t be taught. We develop referral networks and community-wide information systems, scaffolding a user's journey from their point-of-entry to sustained engagement over time, and ensuring that we’re able to meet potential members where they are, in language that’s familiar and accessible.
Our goal is to use loss as a door-opener to lasting friendships, and profound connections with people who can celebrate your good days, and stick with you through the bad. To that end, we work with our partners to develop trauma-informed programming and events, led by and for those with lived experience.
This body of work helps us to narrow the gap between theory and practice. We use those experiences to inform our training and coaching, continually applying what we’re learning as stewards of a community to what we’re teaching and sharing with community stewards.
