The Center for Clinical & Translational Science & Training (CCTST) has observed that people do not understand or trust science or health initiatives. Gaining community trust remains a great challenge, but no partnership can thrive without it. Trust leads to building genuine partnerships rooted in humility, accountability, and long-term commitment.

CCTST approached my team to develop a trust toolkit that serves community members, academic research audiences, and other stakeholders, enabling richer outcomes and participant experiences. The plan leverages the framework devised in the AAMC Health Trustworthiness Toolkit, and applies its principles to actionable interventions carried out over a seven-year grant period.

My team and I developed our understanding of the AAMC's 10 Principles of Trustworthiness to guide our interview discussions, and brought this background to our conversations with individuals from the community and the institution. We asked participants to reflect on what trust should look like, what they've experienced, and how they would like to change these experiences. Themes emerged in transparency, communication, reliability, and empathy, among others. We used these themes to iterate upon dozens of toolkit component concepts, ranging from video and web content to print collateral to town hall discussion guidelines.

I illustrated trust as a series of community infrastucture analogies. The first represents the current state of trust between researchers and community members, in which a transactional relationship benefits no one. The second demonstrates individuals' attempts to cross the river of mistrust that exists between the two groups, while the third imagines a future in which the institution and the community work together to build lasting, fortified trust relationships.

This project will close on May 1st, and will culminate in a toolkit "roadmap" plan to carry the CCTST team for the next 7 years of their awarded translational research grant. I will update this page accordingly at that time!