GROUND TRUTH FUND
Our Ground Truth Fund reads the trust of a community, the Trust Lab does the generative work - building real relational trust into a place, on its own terms. Delivered to the community and its providers, at no cost, funded by those who believe in building on trust.
RFUTR INC. — 501(C)(3)
We bring trust back to the places it's gone missing.
Every place capital moves without reading trust first pays a cost nobody sees coming. Ground Truth Fund runs the read, and Trust Lab does the generative work — building real relational trust into a place, on its own terms. Delivered to the community at no cost, funded by whoever wants to see it work.
This isn't only about repair. It's also about growth.
RFUTR calls it Social Default: the value a place loses when capital, policy, or programming moves in without ever reading what that community trusts. That cost is real, and Ground Truth Fund's diagnostic side — Floor Identification, Reachability — exists to catch it before it happens.
But a floor read only tells you where trust is thin. It says nothing about how to grow it where it never existed at all. That's the other half of this fund, and the reason Trust Lab exists alongside it: Generative Trust — the deliberate, relational work of building trust flow into a place from the ground up, through authentic local media and communication instead of persuasion campaigns aimed at it from outside.
Pittsburgh is the proof this works both ways. The same 90-neighborhood trust read that finds the floor also feeds Trust Lab's local content channel — a live instrument that listens first, then builds relationship, not just reach. We bring trust back where it's gone missing, and we grow it where it hasn't been built yet. Both are the work.
One fund, four phases, delivered free to the community every time.
Grant In
A funder — philanthropic, institutional, or an individual backer — grants into Ground Truth Fund against a named place or problem they care about.
Read
RFUTR runs the Ground Truth Sprint — Floor Identification and Reachability — establishing what the place trusts, and where that trust is thin or absent.
Generate
Trust Lab's relational engagement and local media channels go to work — building trust flow through real community voice, not messaging aimed at the community.
Publish
Findings go public, including a Best Use of Place result for that community — so capital and developers see what a place wants before a dollar moves.
Ground Truth finds it. Trust Lab grows it.
One fund, two matched capabilities — sometimes a community needs one, sometimes both, and the read itself is what tells us which.
Find where trust is thin
Floor Identification and Reachability read a place at census-tract resolution — no person-level data, ever. This is how we know where capital would otherwise move blind.
- Tested against the Election Day Test — 3 of 4 sealed predictions held
- Reliably finds the floor; does not yet rank the full gradient — stated plainly, every time
- A published, ongoing before/during/after track for any place under active engagement
Grow trust where it hasn't started
Local media, real relational engagement, and community-authored story — building trust flow through belonging, not broadcasting a message at a place from outside.
- New communications channels owned by and rooted in the community itself
- Replaces persuasion campaigns with authentic relational engagement, at the pace trust builds
- Every engagement becomes a story the community tells, not one told about it
Best Use of Place — what a community wants, before capital arrives.
Every Ground Truth Fund engagement produces two main outcomes, and Best Use of Place is the public-facing one: a plain, published account of what the place has told us it values, what it's built to receive, and what it isn't. Free to view, built to be shared.
Published for every community engaged, free to view
Not a score. Not a ranking. A plain account of what a place is built to receive, stated in its own terms.
What happens after it's published. A Best Use of Place result isn't filed away — it's built to be shared. When a result goes out to local media and social platforms and opens for public comment, it becomes something a developer or a policymaker can no longer act as if they hadn't seen. Not persuasion. A public, standing record of what the community itself said, with its name on it.
Trust Flow Network — what one place learns, every place gets.
The Trust Flow Network is the fund's other main outcome — built not for capital and policymakers, but for the local actors doing the work on the ground. Every engagement teaches RFUTR something concrete about how trust gets built in that kind of place, with those kinds of local actors. That's codified into a playbook and handed to the service providers already working there — health outreach teams, community organizations, local government — so the next provider doesn't start from zero.
This is how adoption compounds instead of resetting with every new program: the local actors trying to reach the people who need services most get to learn from each other, not just from us. One engagement's insight becomes shared capability across every provider in that place — a real network effect, not a report that sits on a shelf.
Handed to local service providers, not filed away
Practical, not academic — built for someone doing outreach in that place next month.
Four audiences. One fund, doing different work for each.
Philanthropic funders
Fund a standing capability once, and point it at whatever community and problem matters to your own portfolio next — not a single grant that closes out, a facility you keep using.
Community partners
Receive the read, the generative media work, and the published result — at no cost, with no application burden, no match, and no bill.
Developers & capital
Read a place's Best Use of Place result before committing — see what a community wants there, instead of finding out the hard way after breaking ground.
Individual backers
Starting in Pittsburgh, a crowdsourced track lets individual supporters back a specific neighborhood's engagement directly — small checks, same publishing standard as every institutional grant.