Building and repairing trust in social justice movements (Part I)

As adrienne maree brown reminds us, we cannot have effective movements without trust at the core.

Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash. Photo Description: A pod of four dolphins synchronized diving in the ocean with a blurry, dry landscape in the background. Research shows that when dolphins synchronize their movements, it reinforces social bonds.

There is no liberation without trust. This is the mantra that has animated the last two decades of my career. Once seen through this lens, it has become impossible to imagine a liberated world without trusted relationships at the center.

In 2017, I had spent years studying networks, trust, and solidarity. I agonized over how to sum up a dissertation study that unraveled everything I thought I knew about trust. Ultimately, it came down to this:

“Partnerships without a solid foundation of trusted relationships and an intentional focus on the racialized and powered contexts in which those relationships unfold may continue to get caught in a cycle of distrust that inhibits forward progress. The success of social justice movements may not rest primarily on funding or goal alignment but on people's capacity to move together through our divisions."

The evidence is overwhelming: trust is the critical ingredient in nearly every successful collaborative endeavor in any sector. From securing funding to achieving policy victories, our movements succeed or fail on the strength of our relationships.

Over the past two decades in the social sector, I've witnessed brilliant people work together to accomplish extraordinary things. Relationships are the foundation of these achievements - connections built on shared values to drive bold change.

And we remain fundamentally human. We’ve all witnessed conflicts that erupt suddenly like lightning strikes, or those that gradually poison relationships like invisible gas leaks. Despite our best intentions, we sometimes find ourselves navigating varying degrees of distrust, or at best a fragile trust. Maybe hurt people hurt people. Maybe we have not yet mastered the art of relational repair. Or maybe dealing with trust and distrust is just part of being human and working together.

So then the question becomes: how do we build and repair trust in movements fighting for justice and freedom?

Right now, with attacks on our communities and our democracy happening every day, this is not a question we can put off until later.

Trust is how we win.

An Expanded Lens on Trust

I want to be careful not to perpetuate a deficit narrative about trust in our sector. It’s easy to catastrophize about the state of trust these days, but it won’t get us anywhere.

It’s true- trust in the U.S. is hovering at its lowest point since researchers started tracking in the 1970s, according to new data from Pew Research Center. It is also true that typically there are glimmers of trust from which to build from in any context. In the wake of the political chaos of the last several months, it’s heartening to see how many people are “pollinating trust” by opening up their networks, sharing job postings, making introductions, and building new relationships. Part of the path forward is embracing the complexity of our relationships, which includes the good and not so good.

In this age of devastating fascism, genocide, and the systematic dismantling of hard-won social progress, our movements must be more resilient and connected than ever. There is a clear-eyedness in our relationships that is required now. Even in the most trusting of contexts, our relationships can benefit from being fortified for the fights ahead. In low-trust environments, we must attend to dynamics with care and intention.

We cannot confront the question of how to build more durable, trusting movements without facing how race and power shape our relationships. As Ibram X. Kendi shares, racism and capitalism are conjoined twins, inseparable forces shaping every facet of our society.

As people fighting for justice, we are disrupting, dismantling, and dreaming outside of these harmful systems while also being harmed by them. This dynamic will inevitably impact our relationships. Relational repair is a non-negotiable if we want to build a society grounded in collective care and mutual flourishing, like I know so many of us desperately do.

Today's sanitized definitions of trust are inadequate for this task. By obsessively defining trust outside our identities and lived experiences, we're stripped of the power to name our reality. This erasure leaves us with empty clichés instead of the fierce, contextual trust our movements desperately need to survive and win. This means that instead of forcing a common definition of trust, we allow each other to have different definitions- and we invest in learning what trust means for each of us.

The Pew data also reveals something we can't ignore: trust has become a privilege. Americans making less than $50,000 a year, people without college degrees, and Black and Latinx communities consistently report the lowest levels of trust. This isn't a coincidence—it's the direct result of America's caste system. It's hard to trust a society that treats poverty, being a person of color, and not having a college degree as crimes.

Source: Pew Research Center, Americans’ Trust in One Another (2025). Note: Native and multiracial people are grouped into a category called “All Other” and are not represented in this chart. I will inquire about this with the good folks at Pew Research Center.

These numbers won’t budge until we start embracing new lenses on trust that move beyond vague generalities and toward the specifics of how we experience trust based on our identities, cultures, contexts, values, and histories. Like trying to build a house with a glue stick, our current trust definitions and tools don’t match the task. Without a practice of trust that meets the realities we are in, we will continue to have cracks in the foundation.

A Path Forward

Looking at trust through the lens of identity and power allows us to be honest with ourselves and each other about who and how we trust based on our experiences, and cultivate connections that are aligned in just purpose. This is solidarity- the practice of living into shared values rooted in collective thriving.

This is not a sentimental trust gift wrapped in inspirational quotes. This is trust forged in the depths- messy, bold, and courageous. It requires daily practice, radical humility, and a commitment to discomfort as the price of authentic connections that fuel revolutionary change.

In practice this looks like:

We defend each other fiercely —standing up when colleagues face discrimination, amplifying systematically silenced voices, and putting our privileges on the line when power demands compliance.

We speak difficult truths —naming when harm happens, listening to understand, and creating spaces where genuine repair can take place.

We acknowledge our contradictions— recognizing how we simultaneously challenge oppressive systems while being shaped by them, and constantly examining how power operates in our organizations and partnerships.

We live into our values— aligning our actions with our values, having a reparative process for when we falter in our values, and creating space to unpack how shared values are defined and what they look like in action.

We weave our power — mass mobilization can take many forms, from protests to pooling resources. When we creatively and effectively leverage our collective power, we move closer to a culture of care and collective thriving.

What would you add?

None of this is easy, but I can think of no better time to start than now.

This is Part I in a series on trust in social justice movements. The next installment will focus on a framework that helps shift the paradigm on how we define trust.

Articles for reference:

Center for Trust and Transformation (2022) Pollinating Trust: Leveraging our Networks for Good

Center for Trust and Transformation (2023) Bibliography of Academic Literature on Trust

Solidarity Economy Principles (2023). Collective Care, Relationships, and Accountability

Kendi, Ibram X. (2019) How To Be An Anti-Racist, One World

Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2024) The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance. Emergence Magazine

McCannon, Joe (May 2025). Powerful, Not Powerless: Emerging Approaches to Massive Action. Stanford Social Innovation Review

NPR (2020). It’s more than racism: Isabel Wilkerson explains America’s caste system.

Pew Research Center (May 2025) Americans’ Trust in One Another

Weipert-Fenner, I., Rossi, F. M., Sika, N., & Wolff, J. (2024). Trust and Social Movements: A New Research Agenda. International Journal of Comparative Sociology