When I first signed myself up to write this month’s blog post, I planned to share my vision for our organization and community for the year ahead. I planned to try to offer some hope and clarity on what the future might hold for the folks connected to our team and work. But as I write this late at night on Thursday, January 8, 2026 (01/08/26), I’m having a really f***king hard time doing that.
If you’re reading this shortly after it’s published, you probably understand why. If you happen to be reading it sometime after, it shouldn’t take you long to remember or look into why I’m feeling this way. It has been a really hard week to be an American. And for me, this week’s tragedies/atrocities have created an embodied reminder that it hasn’t just been a hard week to be an American, it has been a particularly hard year. A particularly hard year in a hard decade. And the weight of all that difficulty and pain has landed back on my body, heart, mind, and soul in an unwelcome way.
My thoughts on the murder of Renee Nicole Good are many, and they head in so many different directions that I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted what follows multiple times. For the sake of your time and energy, I’ll focus here on one thread: trust.
Since I moved into the role of President & CEO six (6) months ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes organizations great and what causes them to fail. Personally, selfishly, my success as a leader will be determined by our organization’s success – the impact we make, the ways we steward our resources, and the culture that we create here. Beyond that, NEW supports so many organizations and people doing the work that is absolutely vital to keeping our communities together – especially right now. So we have no other choice but to do well and be of valuable service. And in so many ways, I think whether we succeed or fail at that comes back to trust.
Trust matters, because the people in an organization are working towards a common goal, just like a sports team. Everyone has different skills and capabilities, and so we put them into roles that leverage those strengths to meet the team’s needs. And even in situations where every individual is incredible at what they do independently, the true magic doesn’t happen until they find cohesion and begin working as a team. Imagine a basketball team where every player just heads straight to the net every time they get the ball, vs. one where people set picks for each other, pass the ball, and try to assist. Real teams can do things that groups of individuals simply can’t.
But that cohesion and teamwork is dependent upon trust. I’ll pass you the ball, if I trust that you’ll make the next best move. In an organization, trust is what allows us to collaborate and delegate – I’ll hand over this task if I trust you’ll get it done well and on time. I’ll collaborate with you if I trust that you’ll listen to my contributions and offer sincere thought partnership on the project.
Trust turns a group into a team. Trust turns neighborhoods into communities. Trust turns a population into a society.
But trust is, particularly for adults, something that is hard-earned. You can only build trust by making yourself vulnerable and/or being accountable, depending on which side of the relationship you’re on. If I want to establish a trusting relationship with a teammate on the basketball court, I have to give up possession of the ball. And once it’s in their hands, they have to be accountable to that responsibility. You can’t just take a shot, because you want the glory of scoring a basket. You have to make the move that positions the team to win the game, even if that means someone else gets to score the winning points. At work, if I want to build trust, I have to delegate a task *of importance* to someone else or bring other people into decision-making on a topic that impacts them, rather than holding it all myself because I want to be seen as the architect of success. And because of the experiences and traumas we accumulate as we age, it seems that the older we get, the more effort and courage it takes to make those important things vulnerable to others, even when we’re on the same side.
(I’ll tie this all back to where it started soon, I promise).
So trust is important for our success. It’s also challenging to build. But what makes it even more tricky is that it’s relatively easy to destroy.
All it takes to erase trust is to do a poor job caring for the thing you’ve been given responsibility for. A basketball player can ruin trust by taking shots they can’t make or doing a poor job guarding their opponents. A coworker can lose trust by failing to meet a due date, gossiping about coworkers, dismissing a collaborator’s ideas, and more. For every opportunity there is to build trust, it seems like there are ten (10) ways to break it. And once trust has been lost, it can be considerably harder to build it back up again – people don’t easily forget that you mismanaged your responsibility or treated them poorly. Evolution has hard-wired us to avoid making the same mistake twice.
That’s one of the reasons this week has been so rough. Not only have we witnessed acts that would be considered horrendous regardless of by whom they were committed, but it has also been a stark reminder, for me, that I have absolutely no trust in those with power over our daily lives. I do not trust them to hold Renee Nicole Good’s murderer accountable for her death. Nor that they’ll hold agents accountable for shooting protestors in Portland. I do not trust that they will proceed with due process regarding the charges against the Maduros. I do not trust that diplomacy will be the first tactic employed to pursue their aims with Greenland. I don’t trust them to provide a healthcare alternative for the American people after removing subsidies that made care more affordable for millions. I don’t trust them to hold fair and transparent elections later this year. I don’t trust them, period, because time and again they have proven they are not worthy of my (our) trust.
Distrust is an incredibly poisonous and dangerous sentiment for any group of people, especially a nation governed by principles of democracy and established as a republic. If there is no trust between the people and our representatives, then we will, at best, disengage, and at worst…history, as I understand it, has demonstrated that finding a new path forward is rarely peaceful.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what the future holds for this nation. But it can certainly be a mirror for those of us working in groups, collectives, and organizations on a smaller scale. If we don’t want our organizations and communities to suffer a similar fate, it seems imperative that we do the hard work of building up and maintaining trust with one another. Especially when we don’t trust those in power, then we have to find ways to trust each other – our neighbors, workers, fellow community members. Because all of this only works if we work together. And trust is the foundation that makes that possible.
My heart and love goes out to Renee’s child, family, and community in this time of mourning and grief. And to the countless other families and communities that have been torn apart by the government – both here and abroad. You deserved life and peace.
If we can’t find it elsewhere, I hope we can find solace and safety with each other. With you in the pain, anger, grief, disillusionment, fear, sorrow…all of it
