Let’s Talk About Trust ... And Racism
Liz Dozier, Founder and CEO, Chicago Beyond
Chicago Beyond has a history and foundation of deep work in community. Before founding and becoming the CEO of the organization, I was the principal at Fenger High School, which had 300 arrests within the school building in my first year there. Because my team’s approach centered the full humanity of our students, we eventually lowered that arrest rate to less than 10, with double-digit increases in attendance and the school’s state graduation rate. Later, when philanthropists approached me to create a foundation, I carried forward the orientation that community members and young people are the experts. Because I and the Chicago Beyond team had this history of being on the other side of the table, our core has always been in trust-based practice. Unless you have the opportunity to walk from a different set of shoes, it can be hard to see how destructive distrust is. It can be hard to see distrust at all.
We need to talk about the connection between trust and racism. Trust is often predicated on familiarity, and familiarity is predicated on exposure. Chicago, where we are based, is a segregated city. Research tells us that nationally, 70% of people who self-identify as white have a network that includes only people who self-identify as white. We need to be conscious about where our trust (and distrust) are coming from, or we will distribute the benefits of trust-based work inequitably.
We have seen with our partners that a trust-based approach frees them up to really imagine and dream of what their work can look like, rather than being constrained by our external boundaries. And we always have to be cautious of not imposing our vision, but really walking with our partners towards theirs. One example of having to pull back from our preconceived notions of what our partners needed emerged through “Why Am I Always Being Researched?” We set out to invest in research that would enable partners to access significant sustainable funding after our investment. We naively thought that most community-rooted efforts didn’t have access to large research institutions and we assumed that if we funded the access and made the introductions, the truth would set us all free. We quickly discovered how wrong we were. Thanks to the human partnership and ‘support beyond the check’ that had us right alongside our partners witnessing the impact of the research, we saw how the questions were asked, how the data was collected, how meaning was made and all the power dynamics that got in the way of actually capturing the impact of this work. Right around the time we started to realize that we might be doing more harm than good, one of the young people working with an investment, Jonte Durr, asked the question: “Why am I always being researched?” In collaboration with many of our partners, we eventually shared a guidebook about these power dynamics, which to our surprise, has been utilized frequently in research and philanthropy.
It takes time, and consistent action, to build trust. When our partners tell us that the process of planning for their investment was the first time they had the space to imagine and dream about what they set out to do in the first place, we feel we are doing what we set out to do. That’s been possible because of partners’ willingness to try out trusting us. It has led us to deeper financial investments, more support beyond the check, and a sharper sight on racial equity, and trust.