This is part II of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building 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
New Pluralists, “Our Impact,” https://newpluralists.org/ (accessed September 4, 2026), and Inside Philanthropy, “Five Years Since Its Launch, Here’s How New Pluralists Is Combating Polarization,” 2026.
Bridge Alliance, https://www.bridgealliance.us/ (accessed September 4, 2026).
ORS Impact and Spark Policy Institute, When Collective Impact Has an Impact: A Cross-Site Study of 25 Collective Impact Initiatives (2018), https://www.orsimpact.com/directory/ci-study-report.htm.
Tom Wolff, "Ten Places Where Collective Impact Gets It Wrong," Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice 7, no. 1 (2016): 1–11.
David Ehrlichman, Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2021).
Will Oremus, “The Friendliest Social Network You’ve Never Heard Of,” Washington Post, August 10, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-porch-forum-vermont-research-new-public/.
Carl Miller, “How Taiwan’s ‘Civic Hackers’ Helped Find a New Way to Run the Country,” Guardian, September 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform.