Bridges Not Walls: The Art of Building Trust and Meaningful Relationships
In today’s world, where working in a community may often feel fragmented and fast-paced, trust becomes the currency of connection, however, it is in short supply. Whether it is with a friend, colleague, partner, or community, genuine relationships do not just happen, they are built through one small gesture at a time. How do we lay the foundation for trust in a time where skepticism is high and attention is fleeting? In this post, we’ll explore resources, tools and the subtle, powerful ways we can foster authentic relationships rooted not in perfection, but in presence, vulnerability, and consistency.
In our community development work, trust and relationship building means leaning towards an asset-based lens to engage the community. The City of Calgary’s ABCD toolkit, provides five approaches to trust and relationship building using an asset-based community development framework. This entails:
Understanding the story of Place: Involves understanding our relationship to the community in our dealings and engagements. Do we as people doing community development understand our relationship to the community, why we are engaging the community and how deep our engagement process should go? Our engagement and trust building can be accomplished through working in reciprocal relationships within communities to co-create engagement (SFU, 2020).
Recognizing Expertise: We must ensure that the voices of those with lived experiences are amplified and integrated into the work we do. This can be done by acknowledging that community members are the experts in their situations and have something to offer when it comes to finding solutions. As people doing community work, we must do away with the “Saviour” mentality in our work and work towards activating the bottom-up grassroots approach in the work that we do. We should also endeavor to practice our empathetic listening, learning and working towards reducing barriers to participation for community members.
Understanding the role power plays in the work that we do. Our community is filled with different power imbalances. We must work towards becoming power brokers so that those closest to the issues become part of shaping outcomes in their community. We must also utilise a lens that recognises the systemic barriers to participation and accessing power that exist within our communities.
Working from a strengths-based perspective ensures that all people contribute in meaningful ways. This approach utilizes the strengths, gifts, skills and assets that exist within the community to bring about impactful change in the community. Understanding that each community member is valuable and has something to offer to the development of the community is an important step to building trust and relationship. One question that we can ask here is: Who is here? Who is not here? And how can we work to ensure there are multiple paths to participating in the decision-making process to represent as many voices as possible?
Showing accountability is key in trust and relationship building: Who and what you are accountable to can lead to community buy-in or tensions within the community. Listening and incorporating community contributions in our work can lead to community buy-in.
Since our work is in community, we engaged the Growing our ABCD members, who play diverse roles in their communities on what trust and relationship building looks like in their community work, and here is what they shared with us:
Firstly, when working with a community, we must begin the relationship building from a place of trust. Our work must endeavour to recognize the hierarchical institutions and power imbalances that exist within our communities. Collaboration, trust and relationship goes hand-in-hand with recognizing who and what we are accountable to in the work we do. Our members recognize that utilizing the top-down approach in community work undermines trust and relationship as it takes the participatory and decision-making process away from community members. Fostering reciprocal relationships with the community is key in the relationship and trust building process.
They also recognize that relationships are built based on shared passions and through facilitating a safe space where people feel comfortable not only socializing and having fun but also feel comfortable decompressing and relaxing. When we hold a space for people in the community to tell their stories they feel more empowered, which presents an opportunity for people to learn from multiple perspectives and that in turn, builds trust.
It is important to recognize that communities are made up of people of all ages, backgrounds, abilities and beliefs, and work towards creating a space where everyone feels a sense of belonging. This can be done by being a bridge in our communities; listening and engaging with care to bring people together, recognizing and utilizing their gifts and strengths. We also need to make a conscious effort as people doing community work to build webs of care and cultivate kindness across the community. Most importantly, we find mechanisms for utilizing the power of unity and compassion to drive lasting change in the community.
CDLI community members believe that these engagement practices are crucial to fostering trust and relationship building in their community work. It is important to note that in Asset-based Community Development (ABCD), we are engaging communities from a place of strength, by recognizing that communities have strengths, gifts and assets to offer, and as people doing community work we are here to work “with” and “by” them to achieve a common goal. If you are looking to engage your community this year and are looking for direction and frameworks to engage more meaningfully with your community, our Community Engagement Tools will support your efforts with resources and tools to reflect on who and where your community members or organizational members are with their levels of involvement and engagement.