DEFINE TRUST

How We Define Trust

We exist to bring trust back to the places it's gone missing. So people ask us, fairly: what do you mean by trust?

Psychology defines trust in a person. We measure it in a place.

Individuals trust people. Communities route trust. We read the route.

Trust, as we measure it, is the pattern of where a community places its reliance: outward, toward institutions that arrive from outside, and inward, through its own relationships. Every neighborhood holds both. What changes is the arrangement, and it changes from one part of a city to the next. That's why we read it tract by tract.

Trust is built from individual behavior, but it only shows up in aggregate. We don't study people. We study what a place does with its trust.

What we do with it

What trust is tells us what to measure.
How it moves tells us how to plan and design.
Where it lands tells us how to track whether a program is taking hold.

Who we are

We are a lab studying human behavior, and trust is our main instrument. We read a place so the investments made in it can do the most good.

We don't claim to know communities better than the people who live there. The people in a place hold its knowledge. That knowledge is spread across many organizations: clinics, congregations, block associations, schools, lenders. No single one sees all of it, or has a way to sense how well it's working. Our work gives that knowledge a common measure, so institutions can read from one map instead of each learning a neighborhood alone.

Why we do it

Our purpose is to maximize the impact of place-based investment. Our goal is regional: many partners across an area sharing one understanding of how trust flows, passing along what works, and sharing the risk of what none of us knows yet.

Underwritten by Trust.