Landon Mascareñaz, VP of Community Partnerships at CO Education Initiative, answers: How do you build trust?
What thoughts do you have on how to build trust? Well, trust is everything. And, if you look around the country, if you look around the world at health care systems, at social service systems, and education systems, the ones that have trust in the communities they serve, are the ones that are most effective. And the reality is that - and we talked about this quite a bit in the book (The Open System) - that the the power of co-creation is to reignite the possibility of participation, which means that people can trust the thing because they helped build it. And that's everything. A closed system is something that we've inherited, that was not built by us; that was built by not the patterns of community, race and power that exists in our communities. And so that has to be a constant dynamic in our communities. And if we do that and we commit to and I've seen it happen in schools and districts all over this country. Um, you can reignite the passion for trust, the possibility for trust which will lead to a fundamentally different conversation with the community and the system.
