Why We Should Treat Trust Like a Public Good
After a whirlwind UN Week, a few things stood out. Philanthropy is still chasing scale, we are all obsessed with AI, and the world feels dangerously short on ideas for how to address the breakdown of trust quietly unraveling our civic fabric. As Brene Brown recently said on a panel: “People are not ok. [they are] emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, and disconnected.”
All of this got me thinking…what if we treated trust as a tangible public good – something that could be intentionally designed, funded, and scaled?
The Trust Emergency
Across the world, local leaders are already doing the slow, essential work of community-building. They’re creating commons, hosting intergenerational programs, and investing in the invisible architecture of belonging. Yet these efforts are routinely overlooked in mainstream funding conversations as “too small,” “too local,” or “too hard to measure.” That must change.
We are in a trust emergency. According to Pew Research Center, only 34 % of U.S. adults in a 2023–24 survey say that “most people can be trusted.” Institutional trust is plunging. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that 61% of people globally hold a moderate or high grievance toward institutions, and 68% say they believe business leaders purposely mislead people. In the U.S. specifically, only 31% of adults trust the mass media to report fully and fairly, while trust in local news is higher (~ 74%).
Many of us have followed these headlines for years – citing them in presentations, referencing them in strategies, building business cases around the erosion of trust. I’ve done it too. But in doing so, we’ve sometimes missed the deeper story: that while we talk about trust as an input or outcome, we’ve rarely treated it as something to invest in directly.
Trust Is Local
When trust erodes, the consequences show up closest to home and that’s exactly where rebuilding must begin.
“In fragile states, connections are frayed at the national level. But in the United States, we’ve seen a dramatic weakening of ties at the local level,” writes Seth Kaplan in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. While national institutions grapple with polarization and declining legitimacy, the trust deficit is most acutely felt in neighborhoods and towns – the places where people actually live together.
“Trust gives you the elasticity you need to make mistakes, and offers a basis for forgiveness.” — Greta Knutzen, Tusten Social
Some promising efforts are emerging.
In rural upstate New York, Greta Knutzen founded Tusten Social to rebuild community connections. The approach is radically simple: identify gaps in the social infrastructure, then mobilize local partnerships to address them. The result? Free after-school programs for youth, SAGE sessions for isolated seniors, and a genuine “third space” where residents gather across generations. It’s a blueprint for small-town resilience.
Or take Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute, which is investing in the kind of people neighbors can count on – community “weavers” who build belonging and bring others together across differences. It trains and connects them to a growing network of trust builders across the country.
Scaling Local: A “Trust Accelerator”
When we invest in the connective tissue of local life, we restore the basic precondition for collaboration: trust. But as Aly Rahim of the World Bank’s CIVIC program recently observed, “Local, people-driven solutions already exist but remain disconnected from international finance. With aid shrinking and fragmented, civil society risks being sidelined.”
So what if we built a Trust Accelerator – a platform designed to identify, fund, and scale community-based models that rebuild trust where it matters most? We’ve seen accelerators transform the tech sector by fast-tracking innovation through capital, mentorship, and networks. Why not apply the same catalytic approach to civic life? Unlike tech accelerators, this work isn’t expensive – but its returns are profound.
Of course, the objections will come:
- “It’s too small.” Aggregate a portfolio of civic organizations to invest at scale.
- “It’s too local.” Borrow from BlueCheck Ukraine, which has vetted and fast-tracked funding to 28 frontline nonprofits, – de-risking investments in hyper-local efforts.
- “It’s too hard to measure.” Then let’s update the metrics. Trust may not show up in quarterly reports, but we can track indicators like community participation, cross-sector collaboration and perceived belonging.
We already have glimpses of what this could look like. The Trust for Civic Life—a collaborative of more than 20 funders – has awarded $8 million in grants to local organizations reviving civic life. Since 2024, it has supported more than 150 organizations across a third of America’s rural counties. These initiatives don’t just deliver services; they rebuild the social glue.
Right now, the people mending our social fabric are running on shoestring budgets, disconnected from the capital streams they need to thrive. A Trust Accelerator could surface what’s working, properly resource it, and give funders a concrete way to invest in solutions that are hard to quantify but vital to democracy.
We’re Not as Divided as We Think
The idea that Americans are hopelessly divided has become cliché, repeated so often it’s treated as fact. But the data tells a different story. More in Common’s landmark study Hidden Tribes found that the loudest voices are not the largest blocs. Two-thirds of Americans belong to the “Exhausted Majority” – a broad, ideologically diverse group that shares many values and longs for constructive, hopeful solutions.
If two-thirds of Americans still believe in common ground, then trust isn’t lost, it’s simply underfunded.
Begin Where We Are
There’s no quick fix for the trust deficit. But there are better designs, and organizations already doing the unglamorous work of repairing our social fabric from the ground up.
In Tusten, NY, what started as a social mixer for seniors became a civic anchor with vital programs connecting the entire community. Across the world, similar projects are quietly proving that trust can be rebuilt – not through algorithms or slogans, but through human relationships sustained over time.
Trust can’t be coded – it has to be cultivated. It’s time to fund the people doing exactly that.
Fund them. Period.