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The Importance of Building at the Speed of Trust

Updated: Apr 5

Let’s talk about something that quietly shapes everything—how we organize, how we care for one another, how we survive: trust.












Think of trust like the operating system on a computer. You can have the best apps—solid strategies, brilliant people, beautiful policies. But if the core system is glitchy? None of those apps run the way they should. The whole thing starts lagging, crashing, or just not working at all.

It’s the same in movements. In organizations. In relationships. You can have the most loving, talented, and dedicated folks around you. But without trust at the core, things fall apart—fast.





Why Trust Changes Everything

Here’s what we’ve learned on the front lines: trust directly affects two things—speed and cost.


When trust is low, everything slows down. People start double-checking each other, second-guessing motives, over-documenting every move. It costs energy. It costs time. It costs money. And it costs relationships.








When trust is high?


Things flow. Decisions get made. Support gets shared. People show up and follow through. We move faster, more effectively, and with way less friction. That’s what we call a trust dividend—a return on investing in care, honesty, and consistency.






The Price of Broken Trust

If you’ve ever worked in a toxic workplace or been part of a community after harm went unaddressed, you know the weight of low trust.


Suddenly there are more rules, more oversight, more “checks and balances” that don’t feel like support—they feel like surveillance. Meetings drag on. Projects stall. People burn out. It’s a tax on everyone involved.


Even in systems designed to help, like social services or nonprofits, we see this. When there's no real trust between staff and participants—or between leadership and frontline workers—things break down. Paperwork piles up. Communication falls apart. People stop feeling safe.

What Happens When Trust Is Present?


Here’s the flip side—and it’s powerful.


In high-trust spaces, we move differently. People step up, not out of fear, but out of shared commitment. We build systems that are flexible, not rigid. We say, “I’ve got you,” and actually mean it.


That doesn’t mean things are perfect. It means we know how to repair. We know how to stay accountable without being punitive. We move toward one another, not away.

And when trust is high, we see:

  • Faster decision-making and less burnout

  • Lower administrative costs and stronger collaboration

  • More safety, more creativity, and more community resilience

This isn’t just theory. We see it every day—in support groups, in mutual aid work, in the way people show up after release, in how we survive systems that were never built for our freedom.


Building Trust Is the Real Work

Trust is everything. Our work is rooted in believing people, honoring their experiences, and showing up with consistency and care. That’s not a bonus—it’s the baseline.

Building trust looks like:

  • Following through on promises, even the small ones

  • Being transparent about our capacity and limits

  • Creating safety—physical, emotional, and structural

  • Repairing when harm happens, instead of hiding from it

  • Making space for feedback, vulnerability, and truth

When we build trust, we build power. We build safety. We build futures where we don’t just survive—we thrive. Because no matter how smart our strategy is or how strong our mission sounds, if trust isn’t running underneath it all… the system crashes.

Let’s invest in trust like our lives depend on it. Because for many of us, they do.


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