Spark of Trust is an interview show about the people rebuilding trust in our communities, in the institutions we depend on, and in the information we share. One long, honest conversation with someone doing the work: what they’re building, what it’s costing them, and one thing you can do this week.

Not a panel on how bad things are. The numbers are real, the failures get named, and nobody is selling a playbook. No ads, no sponsors.

Host Keiron McCammon sits with the people who chose the harder road on principle — founders, researchers, reformers, organizers, technologists — most of them invisible to each other. If that’s your work, this is where you find out how much company you have.

Proof the work is happening. Language for what you’ve been feeling. Company for the road.

New episodes weekly. Most conversations unfold over two parts, with a companion essay at sparkoftrust.com.

Our guests’ views are their own and are shared to encourage honest conversation. They don’t necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

The first paper diagnosed what broke. This one is about how it gets rebuilt.

The short version: not by an organization. The collapse of trust is a wicked problem — no policy, technology, or charismatic leader resolves it, because every part of it is entangled with every other part, and it shifts when you push on it. What can address a problem like that is a network that learns faster than the problem moves.

Building a Catalytic Community sets out what such a network is, how it forms, and what it would take for one to matter.

It is a network of networks. The model draws on General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, in which autonomous teams bound by a common purpose outperform rigid command in fast-moving conditions, and David Ehrlichman’s Impact Networks, whose first principle is trust. Leaders are gardeners, not chess masters. Three kinds of people have to be in it, and the paper is insistent that all three are load-bearing: thinkers who bring evidence, doers who build and test, and resource allocators who move relationships, expertise, and capital toward what works.

The people are already at work. Bridging groups, civic technologists, local-news experiments, the funders behind them — the paper names them, and its claim is that they are the constituency of a catalytic community, not its competition. What they lack is connection across the three fronts trust fell on, and across the three kinds of people. That is the whole of what this network would add.

It grows in three stages, and they cannot be skipped. First, an information network: people connect, build a common language, and come to share a picture of the problem. Then an action network: small empowered teams take on concrete work under the lightest structure that will hold. Then an impact network: coherence at scale, where the thing behaves like an ecosystem rather than an organization. The paper is honest about which of these it can vouch for. Its argument has three links — that the network can be formed, that it will produce work, that the work will move trust — and it claims only the first, tests it in public, and says the other two are what the later stages exist to find out.

It moves at the speed of trust. This is the constraint everything else obeys. You cannot rush the first stage, and attempting to is the most common way these efforts fail — an action network built on relationships that were never formed is an org chart with nobody behind it. Front Porch Forum spent years as an unremarkable neighborly bulletin board before a flood turned it into the community’s lifeline. Taiwan’s g0v was volunteers self-organizing into project teams until, after the Sunflower Movement, the government came to them.

It says how it would fail. Stage one, as this publication is conducting it, begins with every connection running through a single host (me). The paper sets a test anyone can watch — the network is working when connections form that don’t run through us — and closes with the seven ways a community like this goes wrong, from becoming a cult to becoming a salon, and what guards against each.

Near its end, it turns to a line from Pirkei Avot, two thousand years old and still the honest version of what any of this asks:

Read it in order:

1. Part I: Why a Catalytic Community — the definition, the foundations it rests on, and what transfers from a military network to an open society and what does not.

2. Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages — who is doing this now and why they are not yet a network; then the three stages and what marks each.

3. Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible — the podcast and newsletter as the first stage, conducted in public, and the test we will be held to.

4. Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails — the principles the later stages will have to hold, four task forces the network might run, and seven ways it could all go wrong.

5. Part V: Where We Are, and What We Ask — what exists today, what comes next, and the smallest ask a venture with these stakes could make.

Written by Keiron McCammon.

This is the thesis this publication and its accompanying podcast put into practice: stage one, conducted in public — thinkers, doers, and the people who can move resources — encountering each other one conversation at a time.

Igniting the Trust Revolution

This is part V of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

• Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

• Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails

We have laid out what a catalytic community is, who is already at work, and what it would take for a network of them to matter. The path forward begins where every catalytic community begins: with an information network, formed at the speed of trust. This final section says where Spark of Trust actually is, what comes next, and what we are asking of you — which is deliberately small.

We are at Stage 1, and it is running. The Spark of Trust podcast and newsletter bring forward one builder a week — one conversation and one essay, in public — and the archive is accumulating as the shared record described in the earlier section. Every episode closes on one thing you can do this week, so the catalysis starts with the listener rather than waiting on an organization. That is all that exists. The network — the connections among the people the show makes visible that do not run through us — is what we are watching for, by the test we set ourselves earlier, and we will say in public whether we are seeing it.

What comes next follows from the model rather than from a calendar. As the network becomes visible to itself — guests encountering one another’s work, listeners writing to each other, the first small gatherings among people who met through the show — the steward roles and the community charter take shape with the people who have found each other. The first coordinated efforts follow from that, and Stage 2 follows with them. We will not put dates on it. The lesson from every network we have looked at is that an action network built on relationships that were never formed is an organization chart with no one behind it. The speed of trust is the method. Holding to it is the discipline.

What We Ask

The ask is the smallest one a venture with these stakes could make, and the earlier sections have explained why anything larger would be dishonest. There are four parts to it.

Subscribe and listen. The newsletter and the podcast are free, and the more people who can see the builders, the faster the network learns what it has in common.

Tell us about a builder we should know about. The people this paper is about are largely invisible, and the ones we do not already know are the ones who matter most: every guest who had to be found is evidence that this is a network, not a room. If you know someone rebuilding trust in what is true, in an institution, or between neighbors — anywhere on the political spectrum — that is the most useful thing you can send us.

If you want to support the work, become a paid subscriber. You get nothing a free reader doesn’t; you are funding the work. The publication takes no advertising, no sponsors, and no platform money, which is what keeps it answerable to its readers and to no one else.

And hold us to it. This paper has set out a test for Stage 1, a set of principles for what comes after, and a list of the ways this could fail. Readers who notice us drifting from any of them are doing the work the paper describes.

If the mission resonates with you, you are already part of this. We are not an exclusive club; we are a growing commons. Whether you are an academic researching social trust, an entrepreneur building trust technology, a public servant, or a citizen who has watched trust drain out of your own community, there is a place for you here, and it begins with paying attention to people who are already doing the work.

None of us can finish this. That is not a reason to wait. Rabbi Tarfon reminds us:

“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”1

We all share responsibility for healing our society, and in a catalytic community we carry that responsibility together.

This is part IV of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

• Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

What follows is deliberately less specific than the sections before it. Stages 2 and 3 do not exist yet, and a mechanism designed before the people who will use it exist is an org chart with nobody behind it. What we can say now is which principles a network will have to hold as it moves from connection to action and from action to impact, what each could look like in practice, and what would prove the model wrong. The members will design the rest when they are there.

Stage 2: From Connection to Action

The first principle is that ideas come from anywhere and the path from idea to work is short. In an action network, any member or group of members should be able to propose a project — a local experiment, a shared piece of research, a national campaign — and have it looked at quickly by peers against a few plain criteria: does it serve the mission, could it matter, and does anyone want to do it? Promising ideas become task forces. The proposer usually leads, recruits across sectors, and chooses the method — design sprints, policy research, a pilot in one town. What the network asks in return is small and non-negotiable: a clear objective and timeframe, updates the rest of the network can see, and the community’s values.

The second is empowered execution. Spark of Trust’s role in this stage is to provide enabling support, not oversight: a backbone that convenes, connects teams with experts and partners, and helps secure seed money for research, experiments, or events — without telling teams how to do their work. Once the mission and boundaries are clear, the people on the front line are best placed to decide, which is McChrystal’s1 principle and Ehrlichman’s2, and it is the only principle on which a voluntary network can actually run. Accountability without command comes from radical transparency. Task forces share their goals and progress openly; peers, not a boss, notice when something stalls; and when a team falters, the network can swarm to help or agree to stop. Mutual accountability replaces centralized control because nothing else is available, and because it is better.

The third is that priorities follow where trust is most broken. A network that can see across the fronts can point its energy at the places and questions where the deficit is sharpest — and it should expect those to change. If local news is collapsing in a region, a task force on community-supported models forms there; if one generation’s trust in institutions is far below the rest, a task force forms around that. When conditions change, task forces are rescoped or retired. The precedent is the volunteer technologists who organized during the pandemic through open calls and built vaccine-appointment finders in days3; a catalytic community has the advantage of being connected before the need arrives.

The fourth is the least coordination that keeps the parts coherent. Enough for task forces to learn what each other is doing — so two teams discover they can share work, and nobody duplicates it — and no more. A periodic forum where leads report wins, needs, and problems in a few minutes each is probably sufficient. What the network should resist is the apparatus that grows around coordination: the layer of goals-about-goals that turns a movement into a program office. If the shared purpose is clear and the work is visible, teams row roughly in the same direction without being told to.

These examples of what task forces might do are speculative, but they show the breadth of arenas where catalytic action is possible:

• Community Cohesion — bridging divides in one place: regular gatherings where residents of different backgrounds meet for facilitated dialogue and joint service, continued online in the manner of Vermont’s Front Porch Forum. Progress would show up as neighbors helping neighbors more and as interpersonal trust in that town, as measured by the people who live there.

• Trustworthy Media — journalists, librarians, educators, and technologists working to rebuild trust in information: a “community editorship” pilot in which residents take part in story selection or fact-checking for a local outlet, or media-literacy work. Taiwan’s civic hackers showed, with tools like Polis, that involving the public in how information is gathered can raise trust in it.

• Institutional Innovation — civic technologists, policy analysts, and reformers making an institution more responsive: adapting a platform like Decidim for a city council or school board so residents can propose and decide on initiatives, as Barcelona did for part of its budget, in partnership with a government willing to try.

• AI and Misinformation — AI researchers, ethicists, and community representatives developing standards for trustworthy AI in information systems: an open toolkit or a set of policy recommendations on transparency that platforms or governments could adopt.

The common thread is that each is multidisciplinary, rooted in a place or a problem, and a prototype that the network can replicate if it works. Rather than betting on a single program, a catalytic community seeds a portfolio of experiments under a single purpose. Some will bear fruit and some will not; the network learns from all of them, and because it is connected, what one learns the rest can use.

Stage 3: Coherent Impact

As projects multiply, the question becomes whether they add up to anything. Coherence at scale comes from a strong core — shared purpose and trust — and flexible edges, and from a way of leading that we take from a source outside the usual management canon. The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh closed a Day of Mindfulness at Spirit Rock in October 1993 with a thought that has traveled far beyond that room:

“It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living.”4

We take this to mean that the community, not any individual in it, is the change agent. No single hero, organization, or task-force leader is the Buddha here; the network — the sangha of diverse members working in unison — is what does the work. That has practical implications. Victories belong to everyone and so do setbacks. Each member is a co-owner of the mission, not a participant in someone else’s. And the community achieves catalytic impact only when many people within it act as catalysts, not just the core organizers — which means the core’s job is to keep handing off.

The principles that hold a network together at this stage are few. New opportunities are tied back to the purpose — rebuilding trust — or declined; the question “does this address a root cause of distrust, or is it something we could do?” is asked of everything. Every project is asked how it connects to the larger system and to others’ work: a local civic forum might shape state policy if it scales; a media-literacy project might need a policy change to survive. The network looks for leverage and linkage. And leadership is the gardener’s, in McChrystal’s image: leaders create the conditions for solutions to emerge, which means listening, synthesizing, and guiding the group’s decisions. It is what keeps leadership from becoming the bottleneck.

Three more principles address failure modes named later in this paper. A network needs to know whether trust is moving in the communities where it works and in the policies it touches, but the measure belongs to the people being measured: it is a tool they hold, never a score published about them from the center, and any indicator has to answer, before it exists, how it would be gamed and who would be hurt. Trust has been broken worst for the people with the least of it, and a community that does not include them reproduces the fracture it means to heal; as the network grows, the standing question is who is not yet in the room, across political, racial, economic, and generational lines. And a trust-building network has to practice what it preaches: major decisions about strategy and money are communicated and, where possible, deliberated with members; money in and money out will be disclosed, and any outside funding will be named; mistakes are acknowledged openly and corrected.

By Stage 3 the community should be looking outward: publishing what it has learned, telling the stories of trust rebuilt, and arguing for the policies that make trust easier — open data, participatory governance. Its influence would be felt in how platforms moderate, how local governments engage residents, how schools teach. The signs of success at this stage are cultural more than numerical: communities adopting collaborative approaches without being asked, and people beginning to expect transparency from institutions by default. And if the network loses its way, the remedy is the one the whole model rests on: regroup, reflect, and course-correct together.

How This Fails

A community built to rebuild trust has to be honest about how it could betray it. We keep a working catalog of the ways this could go wrong; these are the ones a reader should watch for, and what we intend to do about each. One rule sits under all of them, and it is a constraint on format, not a wish. A practice or system may be named in writing with evidence. A person may not be campaigned against, no ledger of the untrusted is kept, and no seal is granted or revoked. Our first draft of this rule was a slogan — judge behavior and systems, never people, always leave a road back — and it did not hold. Behavior-talk is how modern cancellation already works; “never people” can be used to spare every institution that has a face; a road back with no mechanism is amnesty as a mood. The format is what remains when the slogan is tested, and the moment this community judges people rather than naming practices, every failure below opens up at once.

It becomes a cult. The founder becomes the product; members’ identity runs through one voice. Every trait that makes a community cohere at the start — a spark, a purpose stated by one person weekly — points this way. What guards against it is structural: the handoff test in the previous section, a format built on guests who disagree with the host, and a preference for anything where the community is the hero over anything where the convener is. We do not yet have an outside body with authority over the convener; that is a gap, and it is named here so it can be closed.

It becomes color-coded. “Trust” is read as a partisan position, and a community meant to bridge becomes one more side. Trust in institutions is already a polarized measure, so the risk is live from the first episode. What guards against it is a booking discipline rather than a hope — voices that cannot be sorted onto one team, refusal of fights that only sort people, and never adopting the vocabulary of either tribe, including the vocabulary that signals which one you are not in.

It is captured by the attention economy. The show learns what travels — outrage, collapse, the diagnosis told again with feeling — and starts making that. The trust apocalypse is already a content genre, so the pull is real from the first episode. What guards against it is the format itself: four beats, ending every time on one thing a listener can do this week; no doom pacing; the diagnosis assumed, never relitigated. If what travels is the collapse, not the work, the show has failed this test, whatever its numbers say.

It becomes a weapon, or it becomes toothless. These are the same failure from opposite sides. In one, “not worthy of trust” becomes a label to hang on a person; in the other, the standard costs nothing because nobody is ever named. The rule above is the answer, and it is why the rule is a format and not a slogan: naming a practice with evidence is the teeth, and refusing to campaign against a person is the road back. What does not yet exist is a slow, named, reversible process for the case where the community itself fails its own standard. That process has to be built before it is needed.

It is captured by money. A sponsor, an investor, or a future capital line buys the halo — or the halo itself becomes something people can purchase by appearing on the show or joining the room. A trust brand with a capital ambition is exactly where this happens. The guards are disclosure of who funds what, material relationships stated on every episode, and a structural separation between the standard and the money. The separation and the governance to enforce it do not yet exist; the transparency commitments above are their down payment.

It becomes measurement theater. A trust score or dashboard is gamed within a year and sends the community chasing the number. The guard is the measurement principle above — participant-owned, never a ranking from the center — held even when a ranking would be easy to publish and would travel.

It stays a salon. The archive fills with the convener’s existing network, the connections that form all run through one room, and Stage 1 is declared complete because the episodes shipped. The handoff test exists to make this one visible; the booking mix across sectors and the political spectrum has to be a constraint that can refuse a booking, not a preference. And the dullest failure is the most probable one: it stays an idea. The only guard against that is shipping, in public, where the failures above can be seen.

Up Next — Part V: Where We Are, and What We Ask

This is part III of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

Every catalytic community begins intentionally — with clear objectives, careful choices about who is in the room first, and deliberate steps toward building trusted relationships. Catalytic communities do not spring into existence fully formed. They cannot be decreed from the top down, and they rarely emerge unbidden from the bottom up. They need a spark — an instigator to call together a small cadre of committed people bound by a shared higher purpose — and then the patience to let an information network form before asking it to act.

Spark of Trust’s immediate focus is that first stage, conducted in public. The Spark of Trust podcast and its accompanying newsletter are the instrument: a weekly, long-form conversation with someone already at work rebuilding trust, paired with a written essay, and published to an audience of people who share the problem. A broadcast does the first half of Stage 1. It makes the builders visible — to the public and to one another — and gives a scattered field a common vocabulary and a purpose stated out loud every week. What it does not do by itself is the second half: connect the people it has made visible to each other. Listeners do not meet listeners. Guests do not meet guests unless someone introduces them. The show is how the network becomes visible to itself; the network is what forms among the people who can now see each other, and that is a different thing, which we will not claim before it exists.

The people we are bringing forward are the three groups the first paper named as essential to a catalytic community. Thinkers: the scholars and framework-builders who study how trust breaks and how societies change. Doers: community organizers on the front lines, technologists building trustworthy systems, public servants open to new approaches, and the people building new forms of media. Resource allocators: the people who channel relationships, expertise, and capital — the funders and investors who decide what gets backed, and the connectors and experts who decide who gets introduced to whom. Every guest sits on at least one of the three fronts the first paper described — trust in what is true, in our institutions, and in each other — and the paper’s analysis of that front is the background to their conversation.

The unifying element is our shared higher purpose: to preserve for our children and grandchildren communities and institutions worthy of their trust. Making that purpose explicit is the first step, and stating it publicly, every week, is how a scattered network learns what it has in common. It also clarifies what this community is not, which helps manage scope: we are convening people who build across sectors and the political spectrum, and we are doing it at the pace relationships can bear.

Borrowing a term from the military, the community needs a “battle rhythm” — a regular cadence of interaction that keeps information flowing. As General McChrystal found, a frequent shared forum (in his case, a daily Operations and Intelligence briefing) can align thousands of distributed operators and “pump information and context” throughout the organization. Our forum consists of the weekly episode and the essay that accompanies it. Each one adds a person, a piece of the picture, and a common language to a shared body of knowledge that anyone can join at any point. The archive is a shared record, open and accumulating — the precondition for the shared consciousness McChrystal described, not yet the thing itself, which needs the same picture in many heads and traffic in both directions.

Equally important in this phase is building trust among members, many of whom are strangers to each other or wary of one another due to their different backgrounds. The interview format is designed for it. There are no speeches and no panels; a conversation runs long enough for candor to replace performance, and it asks about the work as it actually went, including numbers and failures. Guests arrive by introduction, through someone who already trusts them, so the network grows along existing relationships. Listeners meet each guest as a person before they meet the work, which is the order in which trust forms.

That last point contains the test we will be held to. At the start, every connection runs through the convener: guest to host, listener to host, guest to guest by way of the host. That is a hub, and it is how JSOC started too — but the book’s lesson is that the network only worked once the hub handed off. Stage 1 is working when connections form that do not run through us: when two guests find each other’s work without an introduction, when the person on the tape is someone who had to be found, when listeners start writing to each other, not only to us. Those are things anyone can watch for. If a year from now every thread still passes through one host, Stage 1 has not happened, whatever the download numbers say.

Networks bond when members acknowledge their differences and find early common ground, and the conversations surface both. A technology executive and a community activist will diverge on tactics and agree, without prompting, on a statement like “everyone deserves a voice and respect.” Those points of agreement, spoken aloud by people who would not otherwise share a platform, are the raw material of a shared narrative — and they are on the record, where anyone joining later can find them.

Beyond the show itself, a Stage 1 network needs three things, and they are principles: The first is a steady flow of information across the fronts, so that a policymaker learns about a tool being piloted against disinformation, or a funder sees what a grassroots effort actually costs to run. When people can see problems being solved, they gain the confidence and context to act on their own; we intend to recreate that effect by sharing failures as readily as successes. The second is a common language. Different sectors frame the same thing differently — one person’s “social capital” is another’s “community trust” — and a network that cannot hear itself cannot learn. The third is a culture of real listening: empathy and respect for perspectives from across the divide. An open, respectful culture prevents the misunderstandings that fracture trust, and the interview is where that culture is modeled before it is expected of anyone.

Trust-building does not stop when the network exists; it is what the network runs on. Relationships have to move from transactional to personal — McChrystal’s embedding program, which swapped people between units for months at a time, served exactly that end — and how a civilian network does it is for the people in it to design when they are in it. Two principles will govern whatever they design. Reciprocity: people need to see that when they contribute, others respond in good faith, which is why one of our guiding values from Ehrlichman is “giving credit rather than hoarding glory.” And the speed of trust: we will not extend the network faster than relationships can support it, and when friction arises, we will address it before charging ahead. The practical form of that principle is critical connections over critical mass — strengthen the ties among the people who are here before enrolling numbers who are not. Each strong connection adds resilience; over time they become enough to hold ambitious projects. Whether trust is actually growing is a question we will put to the people in the network, and we will believe their answer.

Finally, the community is decentralized and co-owned from the outset. Steward roles — facilitators, connectors, the “network weavers” who introduce people with common interests — and a simple community charter of guiding principles (trust, transparency, inclusion, action-orientation) are how that ownership becomes visible. Both follow the relationships. They are drafted with the people who have already found each other through this stage, which is what makes them a charter and a set of roles.

In summary, the initial phase seeds the network with purpose, people, and practices. If we get this right, we will have a core group united by trust and visible to one another, an agreed purpose stated in public, early momentum from a body of shared knowledge that grows every week — and the first connections that do not pass through us. That foundation is non-negotiable. As Stephen Covey’s work suggests, when trust is high, cooperation and innovation leap ahead; when trust is low, every interaction is friction. “Growing the network at the speed of trust,” as we like to say, is both the aim and the challenge. We will not rush it, and we will be intentional about it.

Up Next — Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails

This is part II of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

The people this paper is about are already at work, and most of them have been for years. On trust in what is true, local-news experiments and community-supported models are being tested in dozens of towns, and researchers are mapping how information travels and where it fails. On trust in institutions, civic technologists from Taiwan’s g0v to Barcelona’s Decidim have built new forms for public participation, and public servants inside old institutions are trying new ones. On trust between people, Braver Angels has run red-blue workshops since 2016, Weave has mapped the local “weavers” since 2018, and Front Porch Forum has quietly connected Vermont’s neighbors for two decades. Behind them are funders: New Pluralists, a collaborative that has granted more than $33 million to over a hundred organizations since 2021 toward a ten-year goal of $100 million, and the foundations that stand behind it1. This is the constituency of a catalytic community. It does not need to be invented.

What it needs is to be connected, and here the shape of the existing field matters. Most of this work is on one front, and most of it does not know the other two exist. The connective tissue that exists connects like to like: the Bridge Alliance links a hundred bridging organizations to one another2; New Pluralists links funders to the pluralism field they fund. Nobody connects the person rebuilding local news to the person redesigning a public institution to the person running a red-blue workshop. That matters because the three fronts are not separate problems. Our earlier paper argued that trust fell in sequence — first between neighbors, then in institutions, then in what we could believe — and that each collapse made the next one easier. A repair on one front that ignores the other two rests on the same broken ground. The work has to be connected across the fronts because the damage was. And nobody connects the three kinds of people the work needs — the thinkers who understand how trust breaks, the doers who repair it, and the allocators who decide what gets backed — across those fronts. That is what a network of networks would do that the existing networks do not, and it is the whole of our claim to be adding something.

The harder question is why one more layer of connection would change anything, when fields have been convening, networking, and funding for a decade, yet the national numbers kept falling. The honest answer starts with what the record shows. Collaboration works at what it aims at: the most rigorous cross-site study of collective impact, covering twenty-five initiatives, found population-level change at twenty of them — in the services, practices, and policies of the institutions involved — while conceding that the initiatives contributed to those changes alongside other forces, and that most struggled to include the communities they served3. Its critics say the model underweights power, community ownership, and policy change4. What nobody has shown, anywhere, is a network moving generalized trust — the number that asks whether most people can be trusted. So we do not claim that. We claim something smaller and prior: the people repairing trust are invisible to one another; visibility is the precondition for everything the record says collaboration can do; and no one has tried building the visibility first and the collaboration second, as far as we can find. That is why the stages come in the order they do, and why we will not claim more than the first until it has been shown to work.

Catalytic Community Evolution: From Connection to Impact

Building a catalytic community capable of reversing the widespread breakdown of trust in society is not a one-time event but an evolving, iterative process. Following Ehrlichman’s5 distinction between learning networks, action networks, and movement networks — the last being his term for a network of networks — we describe three stages we expect such a community to move through. The labels are ours:

• Stage 1: Information Network — establishing foundational trust through shared understanding.

• Stage 2: Action Network — leveraging this trust to coordinate specific, impactful initiatives.

• Stage 3: Impact Network — achieving systemic influence through self-organizing, widespread collaboration.

Each stage builds intentionally on the previous one, setting clear milestones, addressing predictable challenges, and strategically progressing toward coherent societal impact. In the following sections, we describe each stage, what it asks of the community, and how we would know it had been reached.

Stage 1: Information Network — Connecting and Learning

The catalytic community journey begins with forming a robust information network — laying a foundation of trust through mutual learning, shared language, and alignment around a shared higher purpose. Success at this stage involves explicitly articulating and embracing a higher purpose that motivates and guides all subsequent efforts. From there, an open flow of information builds shared situational awareness of the trust crisis, enables the development of a common vocabulary for discussing trust-related challenges, and establishes the first personal relationships on which sustained collaboration depends.

Key Objectives:

• Establish a shared higher purpose that unites people across sectors and inspires commitment beyond individual interests.

• Create a shared situational awareness around the state of trust in society and a common language.

• Build initial interpersonal trust and credibility among diverse actors.

• Identify shared values and initial points of consensus.

In this first phase, the emphasis is on connecting people and sharing knowledge. The community forms an information network that builds a shared situational awareness and rapport among members. People who might never have interacted — for example, a data scientist, a journalist, and a philanthropist — begin to exchange perspectives and information. This creates a shared context and language.

Such preparation lays the groundwork for an initial reservoir of trust. Members see that others are listening and that knowledge flows freely without an agenda. The network at this stage is loose but growing “at the speed of trust” — trust-building cannot be rushed. Early wins here might simply be learning together: mapping the problem, identifying where effort would count, and feeling part of a larger whole. For example, in Vermont, an online bulletin board called Front Porch Forum was started to connect neighbors and swap news and tips. Over time, these exchanges of information built a baseline of familiarity and goodwill. When a crisis hit — a major flood — that simple network suddenly became the community’s lifeline, the go-to place for sharing emergency information and resources6. This illustrates the power of networks of information and empathy as the precondition for collective action.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Participants often bring distinct personal or institutional objectives — clarifying the community’s shared higher purpose explicitly at the outset helps transcend individual agendas and align diverse interests.

• Building genuine trust takes time — embracing incremental progress and celebrating small successes reinforces commitment.

Articulating and aligning around a shared higher purpose isn’t merely beneficial — it’s foundational. Everything else rests on it. Only once members are united under a shared vision can the community effectively transition to coordinated collective actions, the hallmark of Stage 2.

Stage 2: Action Network — Coordinating Decentralized Action

With a clearly articulated shared higher purpose, trusted relationships, and shared understanding established, the community transitions from foundational learning into active collaboration. In Stage 2, the community becomes an Action Network, mobilizing small, empowered task forces to deliver concrete, tangible outcomes aligned with the overarching goal of trust restoration.

Capital is part of what Stage 2 will require. Ideas that emerge from the network will need funding to become anything, and the members best placed to judge them are the ones who have watched them form. Spark of Trust intends to convene that capacity in some form: a way for the resource allocators in the community to direct investment toward ventures and innovations that transform our information ecosystem, reinvent institutions, and rebuild social cohesion. It does not exist yet, and it should not. An investment vehicle assembled before there is a network to source from is just another fund; assembled after, it is the community’s own judgment applied to its own pipeline. That is the sequence we are holding to.

Key Objectives:

• Mobilize cross-sector, empowered task forces to address specific trust-related challenges.

• Translate trust, knowledge, and shared purpose from Stage 1 into practical, impactful initiatives.

• Maintain decentralized autonomy while ensuring alignment with community goals and values.

Readiness Criteria:

• Clearly articulated and embraced shared higher purpose and community values.

• Demonstrated initial trust and interpersonal bonds across diverse members.

• The means to keep talking, coordinate, and pool resources, in whatever form the network has settled on.

With trust and shared understanding established, the community can graduate to an action network. In Stage 2, members mobilize and collaborate on specific initiatives. This often involves forming cross-functional task forces or working groups focused on tangible projects or policy changes that align with the community’s mission.

Converting talk into action is the theme of this phase. The transition typically involves clarifying a common agenda (e.g., agreeing on priority areas to tackle) and then empowering smaller teams to execute. It’s analogous to moving from a talk shop to a workshop: the community discusses problems and starts building solutions together.

Effective action networks maintain the open, decentralized ethos of Stage 1 while introducing a layer of coordination that ensures efforts align rather than conflict. A useful concept here is “minimum viable bureaucracy” — just enough structure to organize work without stifling creativity or ownership.

Action networks still rely on decentralized decision-making — no central authority micromanages the teams. The community runs on a culture of “empowered execution,” as McChrystal terms it. Because everyone in the network has context and trusts one another (thanks to Stage 1), task forces can make informed decisions quickly and effectively. For example, during the growth of the civic tech collective g0v (Gov Zero) in Taiwan, volunteers self-organized into project teams to address issues of government transparency and public participation. This grassroots network, which began as a loose group of hackers sharing ideas, soon spawned tools such as a budget visualization website (to make government spending data more accessible) and facilitated the famous vTaiwan online consultation process for citizens7. These were not top-down assignments — they arose organically from the community. Government officials even came to g0v asking for help after seeing its success in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, leading to unprecedented collaborations (one g0v member, Audrey Tang, served as Digital Minister from 2016 to 2024). The g0v community demonstrates Stage 2 dynamics: empowered teams working on concrete solutions (from open-source software to new public forums) under a unifying mission of “radical transparency” and civic empowerment.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Task force redundancy or conflict — visible work and a light leads’ forum that enable early identification and resolution of potential overlaps or conflicts help avoid duplication.

• Resource competition between task forces — encouraging collaborative resource pooling and explicit alignment with the overarching purpose ensures that resources support collective priorities rather than isolated agendas.

• Loss of alignment by task forces — reinforcing the shared higher purpose through consistent messaging and periodic reviews of task force objectives against the shared purpose.

Stage 2 puts to work the trust, cohesion, and alignment built in Stage 1. By forming empowered, decentralized task forces with clear alignment and structured autonomy, the community translates intention into impactful, practical results, building momentum toward the systemic impact characteristic of Stage 3.

Stage 3: Impact Network — Achieving Coherence at Scale

In Stage 3, the catalytic community evolves into an Impact Network, achieving systemic and widespread influence through sustained, coherent collective action. At this mature stage, the community behaves like a dynamic ecosystem — capable of rapidly organizing responses to emergent trust challenges without relying on central coordination. The collective stewardship, distributed leadership, and self-organizing capabilities nurtured in earlier stages come fully into play, generating sustainable and scalable societal impacts.

Key Objectives:

• Self-sustaining engagement with a critical mass of diverse participants actively involved and organic expansion into new areas or regions.

• Emergent responsiveness as the community spontaneously identifies and responds to new issues, quickly mobilizing task forces or initiatives without centralized direction.

• Collective stewardship through shared ownership and accountability ensures coherent governance and persistent alignment with the overarching higher purpose.

In the final stage, the network achieves the status of a true catalytic community. Separate actions begin to add up to sustained, coherent impact at a systemic scale. A Stage 3 network runs projects and, beyond them, influences systems — whether social norms, public policies, or industry practices — and continues to do so over time. Several markers signal that a community has reached this level of maturity:

• Widespread engagement and scale — the network has reached critical mass.

• Emergent, self-organizing activity — at this stage, the community operates with a high degree of self-generativity.

• Collective stewardship and culture (despite further decentralization of the community) — maintain cohesion through shared values and accountability.

When a community reaches this level, it can truly tackle system-wide challenges. It behaves like a movement or ecosystem, not a single organization. Our vision is that the catalytic community will become a sustaining platform for innovation and action on trust issues long after its initial projects. In the long run, success means changing societal patterns — e.g., making participatory governance, community forums, and cross-sector partnerships the new norm in decision-making, thereby embedding trust into the fabric of daily life.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Governance complexity — using modular, lightweight governance frameworks helps to accommodate growth without bureaucratic burdens.

• The risk of fragmentation — gatherings that return the community to its shared purpose.

• Ensuring alignment — stewardship dialogues can continually reinforce the community’s shared higher purpose.

Reaching Stage 3 is a continuous process. Even as we strive for systemic impact, we expect to cycle through the earlier stages to continually address new challenges — connecting with new people, launching new actions, and scaling further. The process is iterative and dynamic. Yet, each iteration strengthens the community’s capacity and credibility.

This is why Stage 1 comes first and cannot be rushed: connection and network-building (Stage 1) leads to collaborative innovation and solutions (Stage 2), which, if successful, can evolve into large-scale systemic changes (Stage 3). Others have reached it. Taiwan’s g0v community has influenced national digital policy, and Front Porch Forum now covers every town in Vermont and is being eyed as a model for use beyond. By learning from these cases and intentionally guiding our community through the stages, we can create a catalytic network of networks that answers the trust apocalypse.

Up Next — Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

Editor’s note, September 2026: This paper has been revised since it was first published. The organization it described has become Spark of Trust, and the first stage of the community it proposes is now underway in public, as a weekly podcast and newsletter, in place of the inaugural convening the paper first called for. The paper has been reworked from seven parts to five and now clearly states which of its claims are being tested and which remain unproven. The argument — that trust is rebuilt by a catalytic community, grown at the speed of trust — is unchanged.

“In our era of political polarization, ‘fake news,’ and tribal politics, trust in the media, government officials, and even science is fading. This can be catastrophic if an influenza or another type of pandemic arises. Under such circumstances, the public’s failure to trust the guidance offered by public health officials may well make a bad situation worse.”

— Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, 20181

During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust — or rather, its erosion — made all the difference between an effective collective response and public confusion. The failure ran in both directions. The institutions charged with the response asked for more trust than they had earned. They stated as settled what they did not yet know, treated contested policy as science, and suppressed questions they did not want asked; when the gaps showed, their credibility was spent. A public that had watched this happen stopped listening, and some of it stopped listening to everything, including the guidance that would have helped. Trust, once lost, could not be regained by either side. The pandemic showed how quickly a society fractures when that reserve of goodwill and trust is gone. Our earlier analysis in The Trust Apocalypse: How We Lost Faith in What Is True, Our Institutions and Each Other described how this crisis, decades in the making, threatens societal cohesion and democracy itself. We see warning signs in the rise of factionalism, public health responses hampered by suspicion, and citizens doubting the legitimacy of elections and scientific facts. Without trust, cooperation gets harder at every scale: governance, public health, the ordinary business of living alongside people you disagree with.

Reversing this trend requires more than isolated solutions; it necessitates interconnected strategies to transform our information ecosystem, reinvent institutions for the digital age, and rebuild trust between people. The trust apocalypse is a quintessential wicked problem — complex, systemic, and defying any single solution. No lone government policy, tech innovation, or charismatic leader can restore trust at scale.

Recognizing the limitations of traditional hierarchical models and isolated interventions, we previously introduced the concept of a “catalytic community” — a living network that continuously learns, collaborates, and takes collective action toward systemic change. In practice, such networks evolve through stages: from initial connection and relationship-building to co-creating shared goals and strategies, and then into sustained, widespread collective action for impact. At that mature stage, the network itself becomes catalytic — it can self-organize responses to emerging problems and drive change on multiple fronts simultaneously. A catalytic community is greater than the sum of its parts: it actively aligns the talents and resources of independent players toward a common mission (here, restoring trust). It creates the conditions for new initiatives to emerge and grow quickly. It is a purpose-driven network of networks that connects people, ignites collaboration, and catalyzes systemic change.

Drawing on insights from leaders such as General Stanley McChrystal and network theorists like David Ehrlichman, we outline how a catalytic community forms and what it would take for one to produce systemic change. Our goal here is practical. Building on our earlier conclusion — that there is “no silver bullet to restore widespread trust” — this is an account of how Spark of Trust is approaching it, and of what we do not yet know.

What is a Catalytic Community?

A catalytic community is a self-organizing, purpose-driven network of networks that collectively generate sustained societal change through trust-based relationships, decentralized coordination, and coherent action.

The approach is grounded in real-world insights from leaders and network practitioners across sectors. Retired General Stanley McChrystal learned in Iraq after 2003 that traditional hierarchies fail against fast-moving, networked threats. In Iraq, he found that to dismantle a decentralized insurgent network, his forces “would have to become a team of teams, faster, flatter and more flexible than ever.” This meant breaking down silos and empowering small teams to trust one another and act autonomously. As McChrystal writes in Team of Teams2, success depended on “trust, shared consciousness, and empowered execution” rather than top-down control. A culture of familiarity and trust had to replace rigid command, so JSOC’s (Joint Special Operations Command) thousands of personnel began sharing information during daily cross-team briefings, building a “shared consciousness” of the battle in real time. This sharing dramatically increased agility: frontline officers gained “the confidence to solve their own similar problems without the need for further guidance,” instead of waiting for orders. The military’s “team of teams” experience showed that trusted networks can outpace and outperform centralized organizations in complex environments. We apply the same principle: to confront society’s widespread breakdown of trust, we must forge a network of teams (across sectors and communities) that share information openly and act in a coordinated but decentralized way.

Business and social innovators echo this approach. David Ehrlichman, in Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change3, distills the five key practices for effective collaborative networks:

• Clarify purpose;

• Convene the right people;

• Cultivate trust;

• Coordinate actions;

• Collaborate generously.

Notably, “trust, not control” is the first guiding principle — no single authority can command a network, so trust and mutual commitment are the glue. Impact networks distribute leadership and information flow so that each member (node) can connect and contribute directly. This decentralization makes the whole more resilient and creative by leveraging each member’s strengths rather than funneling everything through a single hub. Ehrlichman also emphasizes the importance of continuous communication and learning — regular convenings, shared dashboards, and transparent updates — to maintain alignment and build collective intelligence. Impact networks aim for coordinated action: members synchronize their initiatives or pool resources toward a shared goal while maintaining the autonomy to adapt quickly as conditions change. All these traits — trust-based relationships, distributed structure, open communication, and adaptive coordination — are design pillars of a catalytic community. They enable a loose collection of individuals to evolve into a high-functioning, catalytic community over time.

A third insight comes from the practice of convening itself: how we bring people together matters. The formats that reliably produce candor among leaders are small, off-the-record, and unstaged — no speeches and no panels. To solve complex problems, we need protocols that encourage honest dialogue and relationship-building rather than stage-managed conferences, and we carry that principle into the interview format described below.

In short, catalytic communities are about trust, empowerment, and the ability to act together. They draw on principles proven in military leadership, social impact networks, and the practice of convening alike: push decision-making to the edges, replace control with trust and mutual accountability, and create environments where diverse actors can learn and act together. Our goal is to build such a community as the answer to the trust apocalypse — a “Team of Teams” for society that can respond to challenges with the agility of a network and the unity of a shared purpose. The following sections outline how this community forms, what it will need as it grows, and how it could fail, serving as both an argument and an honest account of where that work stands.

What Transfers, and What Does Not

The analogy to a team of teams is useful and imperfect. McChrystal’s task force became a network to fight another network: an adversary with a shape, one that could be found, mapped, and hit, and against which a hierarchy was losing. The trust apocalypse has no such shape. Nobody is on the other side to out-organize. What our earlier paper described is a condition, produced over sixty years by forces — suburbs and screens, captured institutions, an attention economy that rewards contempt — that a network cannot target, because they are not targets. The mechanism transfers; the opponent does not.

The conditions do not transfer either. By his own account, McChrystal began as the hub. He set the conditions for the network, and it only worked once he gave up the command that had been the norm and let the network share what it knew and act on it. But he had command to build with. He could mandate the daily briefing, order embeds, fund teams, and remove people, and everyone in the room shared an enemy and a clearance. A convener in an open society has to make the same handoff from hub to network without any of those tools. What replaces them is what this paper is mostly about: a purpose people chose rather than were assigned; transparency where there is no command; the freedom to leave where there is no discipline. These are weaker than orders. They are also the only instruments a free society allows, and the only ones that build the kind of trust worth having.

So the claim we are making has three links, and we argue only the first here. First, that a network of the people already rebuilding trust can be formed — that they can be made visible to one another, given a shared language and purpose, and connected in ways that do not run through us. This paper argues that, and the podcast and newsletter are its test. Second, that such a network, once it exists, produces work that would not have happened otherwise: collaborations, experiments, institutions. That is what Stage 2 is for, and we will not claim it before it happens. Third, that work of that kind moves trust in society — not by reversing sixty years of structural force, which no network can do, but by making the repairs visible, connected, and copyable, so that the many small restorations already under way add up to something a country can notice. That is what Stage 3 is for, and it is the link furthest from proven. A reader who has watched a dozen initiatives promise to fix trust is entitled to know which promises this one is making. It is making the first, testing it in public, and holding the other two until the first has been earned.

Up Next — Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages

Trust has been falling for sixty years. Not in one institution, and not in one country — across every measure we have, in the same direction, at the same time. Gallup, Pew, the General Social Survey, and Edelman measure it in different ways yet find the same thing. A polarized society that agrees on almost nothing agrees on this.

The Trust Apocalypse is an attempt to take that convergence seriously: to ask what is actually breaking, why the pieces break together, and what can be done.

It makes three claims

The collapse has three fronts, and they are one problem. The dense local fabric of everyday life came apart — civic participation, neighborhood networks, the small, repeated public contacts that, Jane Jacobs said, trust is actually made of. The institutions built for the postwar world stopped working in this one, through capture, sclerosis, and plain obsolescence. And the information environment became a market for attention, one that mines anger and resentment because nothing holds it better. Treat any of these alone, and you will fail, because each one feeds the others: isolated people are easier to divide, failing institutions leave a vacuum, and the feed rewards whoever fills it loudest.

The deepest cost is not cynicism but the loss of a shared reality. A society can survive disagreement about what to do. It struggles to function when it no longer agrees on what is true — when one recognized set of facts and many opinions becomes a thousand competing truths. Without a basis for debate, strength decides.

There is no single fix, and that is the finding. The paper argues for work on all three fronts at once — rebuilding trust between people from the ground up, reinventing institutions for a digital age, and giving the web the trust layer it never had. Each is necessary. None alone is sufficient. And it goes looking for people already doing it: Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, Taiwan’s g0v, Estonia’s X-Road, Barcelona’s Decidim, journalism funded by readers rather than by attention. None of them is a silver bullet. All of them are proof the work is possible.

None of it happens through a policy or a platform. It happens through a network of people who find each other and get to work — which is where this paper ends and the second one begins.

Read it in order

1. Part I: Where are we? — the diagnosis, in the data. What the long-run measures actually show, and why the convergence matters more than any single number.

2. Part II: How did we get here? — the three fronts, told as three acts: social cohesion, institutions, information. How each came apart, and how they came apart together.

3. Part III: What can we do about it? — the response. Three fronts of work, with what is already being built on each, from Vermont to Taipei.

4. Part IV: Catalyzing Change — why none of it scales without a community to carry it, and what kind of community that has to be.

By Keiron McCammon & Jordan Hall

Igniting the Trust Revolution

This is part IV of a four-part series exploring the nature of the trust apocalypse and what we can do about it:

• Part I: Where are we?

• Part II: How did we get here?

• Part III: What can we do about it?

While no single solution can address every dimension of this crisis, unleashing human innovation will be one common ingredient.

Yet turning this innovative spirit into tangible progress requires more than ideas alone; we need innovators and entrepreneurs united by the higher purpose of preserving for our children and grandchildren communities and institutions worthy of their trust.

Likewise, we need the best academics and intellectuals to analyze the complexities of this quintessentially wicked problem and point the way ahead. Notably, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has extensively studied the impact of social media on children’s mental health, connecting increased screen time with rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens. Haidt exemplifies how research-driven insights can spark tangible changes by raising awareness of social media’s detrimental effects and advocating for reforms — such as phone-free school policies and minimum age requirements. His work underscores the critical role that scholars, policymakers, and communities must collectively play in restoring trust in our evolving digital world.

And finally, we need to align the necessary relationships, expertise, and capital behind civic and trust-building innovation. As Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the end of his open letter:

“...there is a need, an urgent need…to back the morally courageous leadership that is rising, collectivise[sic] their solutions, and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity.”

Building a Catalytic Community

A key element in catalyzing large-scale change will be forming an interconnected network of stakeholders to pool diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources, united by a common higher purpose — a “catalytic community.”

Post 9/11, General Stan McChrystal, as commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), experienced how quickly changing environments can undermine traditional hierarchical approaches. In his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, McChrystal recounts how, in fluid, decentralized conflicts, a rigid chain of command fails to adapt and share information effectively.1 Instead, he advocated for a network of autonomous teams (a network of networks) bound together by a common vision and shared situational awareness. By empowering individuals across ranks and fostering horizontal connections, decentralized teams made quicker decisions and adapted more quickly to new threats. The result was operational and specific: JSOC went from 18 raids a month in August 2004 to 300 by August 2006, dismantling al-Qaeda in Iraq's network.

Likewise, in his book Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change, David Ehrlichman underscores the power of decentralized collaboration to achieve collective impact.2 In the networks highlighted by Ehrlichman, diverse actors aligned around a common cause yet retained the autonomy to innovate and respond in real time. This approach recognizes that solutions to systemic issues require broad engagement, cross-sector partnerships, and agile coordination — attributes that formal organizations alone often struggle to provide.

By synthesizing these insights with respect to the Trust Apocalypse, we can envision a catalytic community comprised of three essential elements:

1. Thinkers: The scholars and framework-builders who study how trust breaks and how societies change.

2. Doers: Community organizers on the front lines, technologists building trustworthy systems, public servants open to new approaches, and the people building new forms of media.

3. Resource Allocators: Connectors, experts, and investors who channel relationships, expertise, and capital into promising initiatives, ensuring that transformative ideas receive the support they need to grow.

When these groups collaborate as part of a network of networks — uniting rigorous understanding, practical craft, and committed resources — they can generate a virtuous cycle of rapid learning and adaptation. Over time, this community becomes self-catalyzing: new ideas are examined by those who study the problem, tested by those doing the work, and funded to reach broader scales. In turn, the community’s successes reinforce trust, drawing in more collaborators inspired by tangible progress, creating an environment where solutions can emerge organically and spread rapidly, rekindling the trust that has eroded in many parts of our society.

Epilogue

Catalytic communities don’t spring into existence fully formed. They cannot be created from the top down or emerge unbidden from the bottom up. They need a spark — an instigator to call together a small cadre of committed individuals bound together by a shared higher purpose. Most begin as simple information-sharing networks where members gradually get to know one another, establish credibility, and build trusted relationships. Only when trusted connections have taken hold do these networks transition into action-oriented communities.

Drawing on David Ehrlichman’s work in Impact Networks, we can see how successful networks evolve through stages: from initial connection and relationship-building to the co-creation of shared goals and strategies, and ultimately to a phase of sustained, widespread collective action (a catalytic community). At every step, participants must cultivate empathy, open communication, and adaptive leadership — qualities that help a network overcome inevitable friction and maintain a sense of shared purpose.

Spark of Trust seeks to serve as this catalytic spark — convening the thinkers, doers, and resource allocators already at work restoring trust in what is true, in our institutions, and in each other. Like most catalytic communities, it begins as an information-sharing network: the Spark of Trust podcast and newsletter bring forward the builders already repairing trust — people largely invisible to one another and to the public — and connect their work to the larger picture this paper has drawn. Visibility first; connection next; collective action as trust takes hold. How a catalytic community takes shape — and what it takes to ignite one — is the subject of this paper’s companion, Building a Catalytic Community.

Whether you are an academic exploring the deeper drivers of societal change, an entrepreneur building a new platform or service, or a funder looking to back transformative ideas, there is a place for you here. By adding your skills, insights, or resources, you become part of a collective effort to restore trust and preserve for our children and grandchildren communities and institutions worthy of their trust.

This is part III of a four-part series exploring the nature of the trust apocalypse and what we can do about it:

• Part I: Where are we?

• Part II: How did we get here?

There is no silver bullet to restore widespread trust within society. Combating the trust apocalypse demands a multifaceted approach. No single remedy will suffice; instead, we must simultaneously transform the informational landscape, reinvent our institutions for the digital age, and rebuild trust in each other. Each one is certainly necessary, but by itself, insufficient to restore widespread trust within society. All three together are both necessary and hopefully sufficient.

Work to rebuild trust in each other will look quite different from efforts to reinvent institutions. Determining what constitutes trustworthy journalism is distinct from rebuilding interpersonal relationships within a local community. Likewise, transforming the Internet from a place where humans connect in service to algorithms and machines that mine attention to sell to the highest bidder to an Internet of humans, a people-centered Internet, where the whole is obligated to orient in the direction of the self; and the self is obligated to orient in the direction of the whole.

At a macro level, the independent polls highlighted above measure progress. When the decades-long decline in trust and rise in polarization are reversed, and we see trust in one another and in institutions rise while polarization lessens, then we know that we are on the right track. Of course, these measures are lagging indicators that show trends over years, if not decades. In the short term, it will be essential to identify leading indicators tailored to each focus area. For example, measuring the level of trust among neighbors in a local community resulting from a particular initiative or innovation may differ from measuring bipartisan regard for a new journalistic endeavor.

Rebuilding Social Cohesion from the Ground Up

At the heart of our societal crisis is the fragmentation of community bonds. As Jane Jacobs points out in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961:1

“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

Innovative local initiatives provide a blueprint for rebuilding trust by demonstrating how neighbors can connect, share resources, and collaborate to address common problems. For example, Vermont’s Front Porch Forum — an online platform designed to foster moderated, localized discussions — shows how digital tools can be harnessed to rebuild the interpersonal ties that underpin a healthy community. Beyond this, cities like Detroit have witnessed a revival of community solidarity through urban farming programs, where neighbors transform vacant lots into shared gardens, strengthening food security and social cohesion. In Philadelphia, the Rebuild initiative revitalizes public spaces, including parks, libraries, and recreation centers, to serve as hubs of neighborhood activity, fostering trust and connection among residents from diverse backgrounds. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the Neighbor Up network empowers citizens to pool resources, exchange skills, and collectively address local challenges. These models underscore the importance of grassroots engagement: by prioritizing face-to-face interactions, inclusive decision-making, and shared responsibility, we can lay the groundwork for a more engaged and cohesive society — one built on trust among community members.

Building New Institutions for a Digital Age

The institutions that once sustained our democracy now struggle to meet the demands of a hyper-connected world. To reinvigorate public trust, we must design agile and resilient institutions capable of evolving alongside technological and societal changes. Drawing inspiration from decentralized governance models, such as Taiwan’s G0v and the civic tech initiatives led by Audrey Tang, we can begin to reimagine how public institutions operate. For instance, Estonia’s pioneering e-Residency program and X-Road data exchange infrastructure demonstrate how digital governance can ensure transparency, security, and accessibility at scale. Barcelona’s Decidim platform offers another example, empowering citizens to propose, debate, and vote on local policies, thereby embedding direct democratic participation into municipal governance. Through these models, we see the potential of digital democracy to engender greater trust in public institutions by making decision-making processes more transparent, collaborative, and accountable.

At the same time, trustworthy journalism is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy, as it provides citizens with accurate information and holds those in power accountable. Newer subscription-based outlets (non-advertising-based businesses), such as The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss in late 2022, emphasize independence, free speech, and open debate. Because it is relatively new, perceptions of its partisanship vary. Some observers criticize it for leaning away from mainstream progressive views, while others note that it features a range of contributors and topics. Still, its membership-driven approach fosters a sense of shared responsibility between journalists and readers, aligning with a broader push toward transparent and less commercially driven journalism.

Emerging nonpartisan media company State Affairs is revolutionizing journalism at the local government and statehouse levels. By focusing on issues that often receive little national attention, State Affairs seeks to empower citizens, representatives, and legislators by accurately reporting on how state-level policies are shaped and implemented. This approach holds regional governments accountable and fosters trust by bridging the gap between communities and their representatives. In essence, these efforts illustrate how dedicated local journalism can serve as both a watchdog and a catalyst for civic engagement, reinforcing trust at the grassroots level.

While none of the examples above are necessarily the solution, they at least point toward the thinking needed to reinvent the democratic and journalistic institutions society has historically relied on to make sense of the world. Solutions that call on the better angels of our nature, reduce polarization, and help find common ground; solutions that avoid the perverse incentives of the attention economy and its inherent self-aggrandizement. The goal is to create transparent, accountable, and adaptable systems where institutions prioritize the public good over self-preservation.

Transforming Our Informational Systems

Without trust, there can be no consensus-based reality — no shared baseline of fact on which an entire society can rely. Historically, we had one broadly recognized set of truths and countless opinions about them. Today, we have a thousand competing “truths,” each tethered to different beliefs or ideological filters. This splintering of reality not only sows confusion but also deepens distrust (compounding the problem), making it nearly impossible to find common ground for dialogue and cooperation.

The Internet and its attendant algorithms significantly mediate our access to information, directly impacting our ability to make sense of the world. Yet, as it exists today, the Internet (algorithms) actively disadvantage sensemaking. The perverse incentives of the attention economy, both for the platforms and individuals, engender a race to the bottom of the brainstem. Institutions we once looked to for protection from the worst exigencies of our collective behavior have themselves been captured. Politicians battle for attention on the very platforms they should be reigning in. Instead of holding power to account, journalists have likewise responded to the siren call of attention at all costs. If we are going to restore our ability to make sense of the world, we need an Internet capable of supporting trustworthy sources of information and open public discourse. An Internet that doesn’t introduce negative bias into sensemaking. As Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his open letter marking the 35th anniversary of his invention of the Web:

“Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity — what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity. The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise — the web was decentralised[sic] with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised[sic] communities, provided individual empowerment, and fostered huge value. Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them.”

Rebuilding an Internet that serves sensemaking rather than sabotaging it is one of the institutional answers still to be built. This paper leaves its design to the builders; what it insists on is the need.

Up Next — Part IV: Catalyzing Change

This is part II of a four-part series exploring the nature of the trust apocalypse and what we can do about it:

• Part I: Where are we?

The decline of trust is not a sudden occurrence but the result of a multi-decade process marked by profound societal shifts. This process can be conceptualized as a three-act play, with each act compounding the vulnerabilities of the previous one.

Act I: The Erosion of Social Cohesion

The first act is the story of modern disconnection that began in the late 1960s. In his seminal work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community1 (revisited in his most recent book, Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again2), Robert Putnam documented the steady decline of local social networks and civic participation that had once been the backbone of American community life. The post-war era had been defined by a rich fabric of associations and shared experiences, exemplified by the close-knit communities of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, where neighborhoods thrived on face-to-face interactions, active community organizations, and civic-minded associations. These networks fostered a robust sense of belonging and mutual support.

However, starting in the mid-1960s, several transformative forces began to weaken these bonds:

• Generational Shifts: The generational transition from the World War II generation to the Baby Boomers brought different social priorities. While the older generation was unified by shared experiences (such as the collective sacrifice during the war), the younger generation grew up in a more individualized, less community-centered environment — a trend that’s continued for Gen Xers and Millennials. Pew Research Center's 2025 study of interpersonal trust confirms the pattern in the data: each birth cohort arrives less trusting than the one before it, with 44% of Americans 65 and older saying most people can be trusted, compared with just 26% of adults under 30.3

• Technological Shifts: The rise of television, the advent of automobiles, the emergence of suburban malls, and even the widespread adoption of home air conditioning all conspired to draw people away from neighborhood interactions and toward an increasingly atomized existence.

• Changing Lifestyles: The post-war boom and subsequent suburbanization led families away from densely populated urban centers. As people moved into isolated suburbs and embraced the convenience of cars and shopping malls, the once-frequent face-to-face encounters in tight-knit communities dwindled.

These factors combined to reduce the overall fabric of community life. The social capital that once held communities together began to dissipate, as fewer people engaged in local organizations, volunteered, or even participated in casual, neighborly interactions. Jonathan Haidt (a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business) blames the loss of a play-based childhood, which underpins his book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, on this loss of trust within our communities:

“That loss of local community and trust in act I is one of the major reasons why Americans began to lock up their kids in the 1990s, which is Act II. Since we now had less knowledge of or trust in the other adults in our neighborhoods, we became much less likely to let children out for unsupervised free play or just plain “hanging out” until a much later age.”4

The implications are clear: when individuals lose their local bonds, the trust that underpins societal cohesion weakens, leaving communities vulnerable to isolation and disengagement. At the most fundamental level, the lived relationships between human beings in shared physical spaces are the bedrock of trustworthiness. If individuals cannot trust their neighbors, this reflects and contributes to broader societal breakdowns in trust.

Act II: The Obsolescence of Post-War Institutions

The second act is that the institutions underpinning post-war prosperity were designed for a world that no longer exists. In the decades following World War II, institutions — from government bodies to media organizations — benefited from an era marked by collective sacrifice and shared purpose. But by the early 1970s, these institutions began to show signs of decay. Landmark events like the Watergate scandal and the contentious conclusion of the Vietnam War shattered public confidence. These events exposed deep-seated issues within the system, undermining the credibility of institutions once revered for their integrity.

The pattern has repeated since. In 2008, banks, rating agencies, and regulators had projected a command of risk they did not possess; when the system failed, the institutions were rescued, the people who ran them went largely unpunished, and a generation learned that competence at the top had been assumed rather than demonstrated.

Macedo and Lee’s book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, presents a scathing account of the institutional failures around COVID policies and information (lockdowns were an outdated and disputed policy; the possibility of a lab leak was known but not revealed and actively suppressed; vaccine efficacy was falsified and pushed through multiple channels) providing ample evidence that a variety of institutions were less deserving of the level of trust that had been granted them.5

Likewise, the July 2024 attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, highlighted the degree of under-competence (the delta between perception and performance) of the US Secret Service and local law enforcement, laying bare problems of leadership, training, resource allocation, and inter-agency culture that had built up over time. It wasn’t just a one-day fluke — it was the result of systemic issues that allowed small mistakes to compound into a significant security failure.

Such institutional failure can be attributed to three interrelated dynamics:

• Capture: Institutions that accumulate significant social, economic, or cultural value become targets for capture by self-interested actors. Over time, this capture shifts institutional priorities away from serving the public good, compromising their integrity and effectiveness.

• Corruption and Sclerosis: All human-designed systems are susceptible to entropy. Over time, institutions grow inefficient, rigid, and self-serving. Instead of adapting to external pressures or fulfilling their missions, they focus on preserving their existence, further undermining their legitimacy.

• Obsolescence: Technological and societal changes have accelerated to the point where institutions cannot keep pace. This growing misalignment between institutional function and societal needs creates widespread disillusionment and systemic failure.

The result is a profound crisis of legitimacy. Trust rapidly erodes when institutions fail to meet the public's expectations — or worse, when they appear to work against the common interest. As institutions become less trustworthy, trust erodes further in a vicious cycle. This leaves society without reliable mechanisms to address shared challenges, creating fertile ground for further instability.

Act III: The Changing Informational Landscape

The third act is driven by revolutionary changes in how information is consumed and shared. Arguably, it started in the 1980s with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, followed by the rise of radio “talking heads” and the transformation of news into a profit-driven enterprise.6 These changes have all contributed to an informational landscape that thrives on division and sensationalism.

Matt Taibbi, in his book Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another, describes how, starting in the 1990s, media began to pry families apart systematically, set group against group, and more and more make news consumption a bubble-like, “safe space” stimulation of the vitriolic reflex:

“We started to turn the ongoing narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the “liberal” media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran through much of the available content.”7

The advent of 24-hour news cycles, social media platforms, hyper-targeted digital advertising, and the attention-and-surveillance economy has further fragmented public discourse. Influential analyses — such as DiResta’s on the triad of influencers, algorithms, and crowd dynamics8 — warn that this attention economy is inherently prone to amplifying extreme views and deepening social divides.

While institutions have been decaying, technology has advanced at an unprecedented rate. Many institutional forms necessary for the future will be built upon the technologies that have emerged over the past two decades, such as the Internet and artificial intelligence. However, these technologies were not designed with the explicit intent of bearing the social and civic load required to replace failing institutions. Instead, they were often created for efficiency, profitability, and engagement rather than for fostering trust, stability, and societal cohesion. Yuval Noah Harari highlights in his book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, the importance of our informational systems to the proper functioning of democracy:

“To function, a democracy needs to meet two conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust. Free conversation must not slip into anarchy. Especially when dealing with urgent and important problems, the public debate should be conducted according to accepted rules, and there should be a legitimate mechanism to reach some kind of final decision, even if not everybody likes it.”9

One of the clearest examples of misalignment within our modern informational sphere is the issue of algorithmic control, as highlighted in the documentary The Social Dilemma. The artificial intelligence systems that structure online attention have not been designed to prioritize individuals' well-being, development, or informed decision-making. Instead, because they are embedded in the revenue models of large for-profit companies, they are optimized to maximize ad revenue, often by promoting sensationalism, division, and engagement at any cost. This divergence between what is best for society and what is best for a platform's business model illustrates a fundamental flaw in today's technological landscape.

Furthermore, narrow and socially corrosive interests have already preemptively captured many of these technologies. Large-scale digital platforms, financial systems, and communication infrastructures are now controlled by entities prioritizing shareholder profit and political influence over public trust and resilience. This dynamic has created an environment where technology, rather than serving as a force for renewal, often exacerbates the problems it is meant to solve.

As technologies like generative AI blur the lines between truth and fiction, we must confront the possibility that the rapid evolution of our informational systems could further undermine our collective ability to distinguish fact from fabrication.

A Holistic View of the Crisis

These three acts are deeply interconnected:

• The erosion of community bonds (Act I) isolates individuals, making them more susceptible to the allure of divisive online content.

• The decay of institutional integrity (Act II) provides fertile ground for populist narratives that exploit these social divisions.

• The transformation of the informational environment (Act III) amplifies these trends by saturating public discourse with misinformation and sensationalism.

To fully understand the crisis of trust, we must integrate these three dimensions: informational, institutional, and communal. Institutions have failed, but the technologies that could replace them are misaligned with societal needs, and the human relationships that underpin trust have been severely weakened. If people don’t trust each other, they’ll never trust institutions — not feeling alone and under threat is the basis on which all other trust has to be built. Yet, how can we trust each other when our informational systems are tearing us apart?

Addressing one of these domains in isolation will not be enough. Any meaningful solution must consider the interdependent nature of these failures and seek to realign institutional functions, technological design, and community structures toward a foundation of long-term trustworthiness and resilience.

Up Next — Part III: What can we do about it?

Editor’s note, September 2026: This post has been updated with the most recent survey data from Gallup, Pew Research Center, the General Social Survey, and the Edelman Trust Barometer. The analysis is unchanged.

This is part I of a four-part series exploring the nature of the trust apocalypse and what we can do about it.

“Trust is like the air we breathe — when it’s present, nobody really notices. When it’s absent — everybody notices.”

— Warren Buffett

Over the past several decades, trust — once the unseen glue holding our society together — has steadily eroded. Trust in institutions — government, media organizations, the scientific establishment, the judiciary, academia, health, and organized religion, to name a few — trust in Corporate America, and perhaps more worryingly, trust in each other, have all declined. Multi-decade polls, from Gallup and the Pew Research Center to Edelman’s annual trust surveys, confirm that this is a widespread and enduring trend, not a transient phase.

Gallup’s decades-long surveys reveal a steady erosion of trust in the fourteen key institutions (the church or organized religion, the military, the U.S. Supreme Court, banks, the public schools, newspapers, Congress, television news, organized labor, the presidency, the police, the medical system, the criminal justice system, and big business) it has tracked since 1993.1 Average confidence has now sat below 30% for five consecutive years and stands at 27%, with twelve of the fourteen institutions at or near their record lows:

Pew Research Center has asked Americans since 1958 whether they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time.2 In the early 1960s, roughly 75% said yes; as of 2025, just 17% do — after readings of 16% in 2023 and 22% in 2024, among the lowest measures in nearly seven decades of polling:

Even the historically venerated Supreme Court has seen an erosion of trust over recent decades:3

The General Social Survey (GSS) conducted in the United States since 1972 by NORC at the University of Chicago includes a question about interpersonal trust: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”4 In the early 1970s, a significantly higher portion of Americans said “most people can be trusted” than do today. Over the decades, the share answering “most people can be trusted” has decreased to under 30%:5

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer suggests where this leaves us: 70% of Americans are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who holds different values, believes different facts, or comes from a different background — what Edelman calls an insular trust mindset. The same survey finds the trust gap between high- and low-income Americans is the widest of any country measured, at 29 points, and that 65% worry other countries deliberately contaminate our media with falsehoods to inflame our differences. Edelman surveys online panels rather than probability samples, so its figures are best read as directional — but the direction matches everything above.6

This decline in trust is not a mere statistical curiosity; it has profound real-world implications:

• Collective Action and Social Cohesion: When trust erodes, coordinated action — whether in response to crises or in pursuit of shared goals — becomes increasingly complex. A society lacking trust is prone to gridlock, where cooperation gives way to suspicion and fragmentation. When we no longer have a basis for debate, strength becomes the determining factor.

• Institutional Functioning: Institutions are designed to mediate conflict, provide services, and uphold the common good. Without trust, these institutions lose their legitimacy, resulting in inefficiency and a diminished ability to address the complex challenges of modern society. The scale at which societies can effectively organize shrinks, as evidenced by the decline in the power of supranational bodies (e.g., the UN, WHO, and the EU) and a resurgence of nationalism.

• Polarization and Fragmentation: As trust dwindles, society risks sliding into one of two dangerous trajectories: a low-trust society characterized by pervasive disengagement and social disarray or one marked by extreme polarization that could eventually lead to societal partition or collapse. Historical precedents, such as the breakup of Yugoslavia or the partition of India, remind us of the catastrophic consequences of unchecked societal fragmentation.

Events of the past several years serve as stark reminders of the high stakes involved:

• The events of January 6th, 2021, where long-simmering distrust and polarization culminated in a direct attack on democratic institutions.

• Incidents such as the attempted assassination of political figures and the high-profile targeting of leaders in major corporations underscore the volatility that accompanies the transition from a high- to a low-trust society.

• The aggressive rhetoric and policy decisions of successive administrations have further accelerated the erosion of trust as longstanding institutions are called into question or directly undermined.

The convergence of findings from Gallup, Pew Research Center, GSS, and Edelman paints a sobering picture. This phenomenon transcends isolated failures, reflecting a pervasive crisis destabilizing nearly every major societal structure. The implications are profound, as trust is the foundation of collective action, social cohesion, and the effective functioning of a complex society.

Up Next — Part II: How did we get here?