These are not good times for trust in society. People have been put off by political, economic and social elites, from the banking crisis and MPs’ expenses to newspaper phone hacking. The public don’t see the qualities needed to turn away from an époque of trouble.
Rob Corcorcan, founder of Hope in the Cities USA and national director of Initiatives of Change USA, reflected on all this when he addressed a Greencoat Forum on the theme of ‘Trustbuilding: an American perspective’ in the London centre of Initiatives of Change on 1 November 2011.
He presented his book Trustbuilding: an honest conversation on race, reconciliation, and responsibility (University of Virginia Press).
Corcoran was based in Richmond, Virginia, the former Confederate capital and the county’s largest interstate slave market in the first half of the nineteenth century. He has been working on trust-building for over 30 years with amazing results, leading to his drafting the introduction to a White House document for President Bill Clinton’s initiative on race relations. Hope in the Cities (HiC) promotes ‘honest conversation’ community dialogues on issues of race, reconciliation and responsibility, and was one of the organizations that collaborated to create the handbook. HiC has expanded from Richmond to cities across the USA and overseas.
Richmond has a bloody history of slavery and racism, but there are things which can be done to turn the situation around and gain trust. For instance, as Corcorcan explained, reporters at the The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a newspaper which used to support segregation, have been learning about the history of Richmond. Thanks in part to interacting with Hope in the Cities, they have changed their way of telling news stories, becoming more respectful, just and accurate.
‘We sent an interracial team to meet with senior editors, to share our vision for Richmond and invited the newspaper to be part of that vision,’ Corcorcan explained. ‘Editors and reporters took part in dialogues and community forums. The managing editor asked us to take staff on a history tour of the city to sensitize them to the community. Many impartial observers agree that news reporting has become much more responsive to community concerns, issues related to racial history, and Richmond’s increasingly multicultural population,’ he said.
To build trust everything comes down to human relationships, he continued. We all have our own truths, but that shouldn’t mean they have to collide with others’ truths. Trust is indispensable to tackle challenges within communities.
The author highlighted four points which help build trust:
1) Live self-reflective lives. Trustbuilding means modelling the change we want to see around us, by living self-reflectively. We must become the catalysts of change.
2) Welcome everyone to the table. We have to be open towards the person or people we are interacting with, and invite to dialogues even those who we find hard to deal with; we have to be good at careful listening.
3) Acknowledge difficult history. An important part in trustbuilding is being able to honour the sacred stories of each person and each community.
4) Build and sustain a team. The greatest resources in any community are networks of people who know each other, care for each other and can count on each other. These networks are not necessarily linked by organizational structures, but they are linked by intangible threads of relationships and shared understanding. These informal networks provide moral and spiritual support for courageous initiatives.
]Corcorcan thinks the US is still scarred by its history of slavery. He considers that apology alone is not enough to build trust between communities. As someone said after receiving an apology, ‘What now?’ How does behaviour subsequently change? Corcoran said there is still a lot to do regarding equality in his country. But he is an optimist, so he concluded optimistically: ‘As we continue to hold up a vision of what our communities can become, we find that difficulties and even painful history, if faced honestly, can become our most powerful assets. Most importantly, we must do it together: we need each other.’
Corcoran’s forum talk was the culmination of his week-long tour of UK cities, addressing audiences and meeting community leaders in Nottingham, Bradford and Liverpool.
Jonathan Lopez
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