August 11, 2026
We facilitated the 2026 Economic Recovery Corps (ERC) Annual Retreat in Washington, D.C. with specific intentions: Over three days, ERC fellows, host organizations, and national partners would gather to refresh and restore their energy, celebrate what had been built together, and begin an intentional process of wrapping up the two and a half year long fellowship. But the backbone of the entire gathering was the capstone showcase, a window into the deep community-based learning that fellows had undertaken since the beginning.
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What emerged when fellows shared their capstones was something we hadn’t fully anticipated: a theme so consistent across presentations, so rooted in the actual experience of the fellowship, that it amounts to a collective finding. Across communities as different as the fellows who served them, one word kept surfacing.
That word was trust.
Not as a soft skill or a background condition. Not as a prerequisite to check off before the “real” work begins. Trust emerged, presentation after presentation, as a central outcome of the fellowship itself, the thing that fellows had built, expanded, tested, and confirmed through their economic development work.
Trust operates at two distinct levels: first, the trust fellows built with the communities and partners they served. But trust was also built within the ERC community, a powerful resilient network forged through the shared experience of doing hard, uncertain, relational, economic development work. By the end of the capstone showcase, it was clear that we needed to rethink entirely how the field of economic development conceptualizes trust.
What is a capstone? The ERC Fellowship capstone is a personal project that every fellow develops over the course of their fellowship. It is grounded in the real work fellows are doing with their host communities, but its primary purpose is not to produce a client deliverable. Instead, the capstone shows the fellow’s own learning and contributes something meaningful to the broader field of economic development. A capstone might take many forms: a toolkit designed for replication, a case study documenting an innovative approach, or a policy brief drawn from on-the-ground experience. What unifies them is the question every fellow is asked to answer: “what am I learning, and how is that learning a contribution to the field?”
Action Research as a Trust-Building Practice
At the heart of the ERC Fellowship is participatory action research, a simple but powerful iterative cycle: Look, Think, Act. Look deeply at the community context, without rushing to conclusions. Think carefully about what you’re seeing, in collaboration with the people closest to the work. Act with intention on what you’ve learned together, then return to looking again. It is not a linear process. It is a practice, one that I noted in a previous blog, is more like a muscle than a method. It takes intentionality, rhythm, and support to build. But when adopted, it changes how practitioners lead.
One thing that distinguishes participatory action research from conventional program delivery is the shift it demands in the practitioner. Fellows are not experts parachuting into communities with pre-formed solutions. They are co-learners and co-researchers, working alongside residents, local organizations, business owners, and civic leaders to frame questions together, test ideas with the community, make sense of what they find, and adapt accordingly. Through this process, power and leadership shift toward those closest to the work. Local knowledge is elevated alongside technical expertise. Decisions are grounded in that specific place rather than imposed from outside.
This matters enormously for trust building, and it connects to one of the more counterintuitive insights that emerged from the capstone presentations: action research gave fellows both a method and a justification to resist pressure for quick fixes.
For better or worse, economic development is a field that often rewards visible activity and measurable short-term outputs. Fellows faced consistent pressure to produce results before they had adequately understood the context they were working in. Action research helped them hold that pressure at bay—not by being passive, but by making the case that moving too fast, before relationships were built and context was understood, was a sure path to failure. Slowing down is not hesitation, it’s a strategy.
What the capstone presentations revealed is that this strategy is not just productive, it is relationally transformative. By showing up repeatedly to the same community spaces, by designing community engagements collaboratively rather than arriving with answers, fellows weren’t just gathering data. They were demonstrating commitment. Each cycle of action research was also a cycle of trust-building: a signal that the fellow was genuinely present, genuinely listening, and genuinely willing to be changed by what they heard.
They learned to ask appreciative questions that opened up conversation rather than closed it down. And they learned, sometimes uncomfortably, that trust cannot be built without first reckoning with history: the grievances, broken promises, and institutional failures that shape how underinvested communities interpret every new face that shows up claiming to help.
In their Capstone Showcase, fellows documented trust not as an incidental byproduct but as a measurable, meaningful outcome. Communities and partners that had been skeptical became invested. Doors that had been closed opened. Networks that had been fragmented began to come together. The methodology of the fellowship, including structured reflection, iterative action, deep immersion, and a genuine disposition of openness, turned out to be a trust-generation machine.
The Limits of Social Capital: Why Trust Deserves Its Own Category
For decades, asset-based frameworks like the Community Capitals and Wealthworks have given economic development practitioners a shared vocabulary for understanding community assets. For instance, thinking in terms of physical capital can help measure the value of buildings, roads, parks, and broadband to a community. Or how education and experience make up the human capital of individuals or communities.
Asset-based frameworks are genuinely powerful and useful. But reflecting on the ERC capstone presentations surfaced a limitation worth naming directly: trust tends to get subsumed under social capital, and social capital as the field typically uses the term can be transactional.
Social capital describes connections and networks, the existence of human relationships. It does not fully capture the quality or depth of those relationships, and it says nothing about the historical conditions that make those relationships possible or impossible in the first place.
A community may have dense community networks and still have low levels of trust in the institutions those networks are supposed to engage. Social capital can exist between parties who barely tolerate each other but need something the other has. Trust is something different.
What fellows have built in their communities is something more specific, more fragile, and ultimately more foundational. Trust, the belief, earned through consistent presence, honest engagement, and demonstrated respect for community voice, that another party is reliable, genuinely curious about what they don’t yet know, and oriented toward shared benefit rather than outside agendas.
Trust is the precondition for the kind of authentic collaboration that produces lasting change. And it cannot be manufactured through outreach campaigns or stakeholder meetings alone. It cannot be bought in extractive corporate promises. It has to be earned, slowly, through relationships.
If we continue to treat trust as simply one dimension of social capital, we risk systematically undervaluing it and underinvesting in the practices that generate it. The fellows’ capstone work suggests that it is time for the field to elevate trust to its own category: Trust Capital.
What Trust Capital Looks Like in Practice
Defining trust capital requires more than describing its structural properties, like how it accumulates, how it dissipates, how it can be leveraged. It also requires understanding what practitioners must know, how they must show up, and what they must actually do to build it. The ERC Fellows’ experience, synthesized across two years of action research, offers a working definition organized around three dimensions.
Power Awareness: What trust-builders need to know.
Trust capital doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It sits within a specific community context shaped by history, power, and institutional relationships. Practitioners like Mina Virtua Jr on the Big Island in Hawaii understand trust as a dimension of community infrastructure. They are aware of the relationship between trust and institutional legitimacy: communities that have experienced broken promises from government agencies, development programs, or outside organizations carry that history into every new engagement. Practitioners like Servola Frasier in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, have shown that community narratives about past harms are not obstacles to overcome. They are the starting point of any honest conversation. And they know that trust capital grows from specific tactics: involving folks early in the process, creating the condition for honest participation, and stepping back so that community voices can lead.
Intentional Respect: How trust-builders need to show up.
Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. Fellows like Will Warren in Eastern Kentucky consistently found that the dispositions they brought to their communities mattered as much as any technique. Humility and approaching communities with openness rather than expertise was perhaps the most frequently named. Respect for lived experience as a valid and important form of knowledge shaped how fellows framed their questions and whose answers they elevated. An openness to dialogue across differences of power, identity, and perspective (and the willingness to sit with discomfort) was what allowed fellows like Ryan Williams in Rochester NY to connect with hard to reach community members and partners who had learned, often for good reason, to distrust outsiders.
Emergent Commitment: What trust-builders need to do.
An inclination to trust only becomes trust capital when it is demonstrated through consistent behavior. Fellows like Darya Pilram in Spokane, WA, learned to ask generative questions of many different community members, questions that opened up possibilities for collaboration rather than steering a community conversation towards a predetermined conclusion. They also acknowledge historical harms directly, naming the communication failures that had made trust scarce rather than pretending those failures hadn’t happened. Fellows like Landdis Hollifield in Highland County, VA, elevated community voices in strategy and decision-making, not as a procedural courtesy but as a substantive commitment to letting the community shape the work.
Taken together, these dimensions—power, respect, commitment—constitute a practice of trust-building that is learnable, transferable, and, as the ERC Fellows demonstrated, capable of producing real and lasting change in communities. Trust capital is not a personality trait. It is a competency. And like any competency, it can be developed.
Some of the structural properties of trust capital that fellows observed are worth naming as well, because they carry practical implications for how programs and institutions should invest:
- Trust is accumulated slowly and lost quickly. It demands patience, long-term investment by funders, and ongoing stewardship by trusted practitioners.
- Trust enables risk and unlocks investment. Where trust exists, resources and community buy-in flows more freely; where it is absent, even well-funded efforts stall.
- Trust is inherently local, often hyperlocal, built relationship by relationship, context by context, in ways that cannot be shortcut or scaled prematurely.
A Second Layer: Trust Among Fellows Themselves
So far, this account has focused on the trust fellows built with their communities. But the retreat revealed something equally important, and perhaps more surprising: an extraordinary depth of trust had also developed among the fellows themselves.
This was not simply the collegial warmth of a professional cohort. It was something more substantive, the kind of trust that forms when people struggle through difficult problems together in public, make mistakes alongside each other, and choose to keep showing up anyway. Fellows watched each other navigate skeptical stakeholders and resistant institutions. They workshopped each other’s action research cycles in monthly cohort meetings and quarterly virtual retreats. They had been honest about what wasn’t working and generous with what was. Over two years, and across communities as geographically and economically varied as the country itself, they had become genuine peers in the deepest sense of the word.
This second source of trust was emergent from the common purpose of the fellowship process itself, and the unique situation that ERC found itself in following the federal grant freeze in early 2025 (for more on this, see the blog on our annual retreat convening in Puerto Rico). The pressures on the fellowship sparked a new collaborative approach, spearheaded by fellow facilitators and Root Change together, for fellow-led fellowship programming and better internal communication, leading to a strong foundation for peer-to-peer exchange.
The capstone process was particularly important here. Because fellows were required not just to do their work but to reflect on it and make their reasoning and their struggles visible, they gave each other something rare: an honest window into what it actually looks like to practice transformational economic development from the inside. That transparency is the substrate on which real trust grows.
The implications of this intra-cohort trust capital are significant, and they extend well beyond the fellowship itself. When these fellows transition into the alumni stage and return to their communities and careers with new credentials and expanded networks, they will not be going alone. They will carry with them a web of trusted relationships with practitioners across the country who understand their context, share their values, and have proven themselves reliable under pressure. That network is not a LinkedIn connection list. It is a durable professional asset, built the same way trust always is: through time, honesty, and shared struggle.
This is what makes the alumni stage of the ERC Fellowship potentially so powerful. Fellows entering it won’t need to build trust with each other from scratch. That work is already done. They can move faster, collaborate more readily and authentically, and take bigger risks together precisely because the foundation is already there. In this sense, the fellowship hasn’t just built trust capital in communities across the country. It has built a national network of practitioners whose trust in each other is itself a form of infrastructure for the field.
Trust Capital Is Multi-Layered
Taken together, the community-facing trust and the peer trust that emerged from the fellowship point toward a more nuanced understanding of trust capital than any single-level account can capture. Trust, it turns out, is not just one thing happening in one direction. It is multi-layered.
At the community level, trust flows between practitioners and the people they serve. It is built through presence, consistency, and genuine orientation toward shared benefit. It is hyperlocal, fragile, and hard to replace.
At the peer level, trust flows among practitioners who have worked alongside each other over time. It is built through shared struggle, honest reflection, and the particular intimacy of watching someone move through hard work over time. It is portable in a way community trust is not: it travels with practitioners across roles, organizations, and geographies.
Both layers are real. Both compound over time. And both, the ERC Fellowship has demonstrated, can be intentionally cultivated through program design, as long as the program is patient enough, reflective enough, and honest enough to make room for them.
Implications for the Field
If trust is a distinct, multi-layered form of capital and not merely a facet of social capital, then economic development practice needs to reckon with what that means for how we design programs, measure success, and allocate resources.
It means that time, specifically the time required for sustained, relational engagement, is not “overhead.” It is the investment. Funders and program designers who push practitioners toward rapid deployment and short project cycles are, in effect, deprioritizing and defunding trust-building. The ERC Fellowship’s multi-year structure was not incidental to the trust fellows built; it was the reason they were able to build it. And the pressure fellows frequently encountered to produce visible results before they had adequately understood their community context is a design flaw worth naming: programs that reward early outputs over relational depth are quietly and intentionally choosing transaction over trust.
It means that learning infrastructure is trust infrastructure. The monthly cohort meetings, quarterly virtual retreats, peer coaching, and capstone reflection cycles that ERC built around its fellows weren’t supplementary professional development. They were the conditions under which both kinds of trust capital—community-facing and peer-to-peer—could form and compound. Without dedicated time, tools, and structured support, reflection becomes optional, growth stalls, and the insights that could reshape the field stay locked in the heads of individual practitioners. Investing in learning is not ancillary to impact. It is the engine that generates it.
Separation and silos within a system also inhibit trust. Initial ERC convenings separated fellows from hosts from national partners with the unintended result of uneven experience and learning. Later convenings corrected course from this, creating virtual and in person spaces where all parts of the ERC system come together for shared learning.
This co-learner model, where fellows, hosts, and national partners are all treated as contributors to a shared body of knowledge rather than as expert and recipient, is not just an ideological preference. It is a trust-building strategy. When everyone in a system is positioned as someone who knows something worth knowing, the power dynamics that make authentic community engagement so difficult begin, incrementally, to shift.
And it means that we need better ways to see and measure trust capital at both levels. Our current evaluation frameworks are not well-suited to capturing relational depth, the slow compounding of credibility over time, or the quality of community co-ownership in a strategy. Developing those tools or adapting existing ones is one of the most important methodological challenges facing the field. What gets measured gets invested in. If trust capital remains invisible in our evaluations, it will remain underinvested in our programs.
The ERC Annual Retreat left me thinking differently about the work we do and the frameworks we use to make sense of it. The fellows who presented their capstone projects over those three days didn’t set out to make a theoretical argument. They were sharing the honest, sometimes messy, always instructive story of what they had learned through two years of iterative action research: looking carefully, thinking collaboratively, acting with humility, and returning to look again. And what they had learned, collectively and independently, was that trust is not a means to an end in community and economic development.
Trust is an end goal in and of itself. And it is also what makes other goals achievable.
The ERC model is an argument that economic development can be done differently, made in practice, over time, in more than sixty communities. Away from extractive technical assistance and toward peer-driven learning, co-created knowledge, and community-led innovation. Away from the fiction that trust can be manufactured quickly, and toward the harder, more rewarding work of earning it slowly. The fellows who participated in this program have planted seeds that will grow long after the fellowship ends. Grow in their communities, in their careers, and in each other. The trust capital they’ve built is not a program outcome. It is, as ERC Host Dr. Lomax Campbell and Rob Williams put it, infrastructure.
And if the field is paying attention, it is also a transformational model to do economic development differently.
Naming trust as capital gives us language to protect the conditions that generate it. Defining it with precision as a competency grounded in specific knowledge, dispositions, and behaviors means we can teach it, develop it, and assess it, rather than treating it as a mysterious quality that some practitioners happen to possess. And recognizing that it operates at multiple layers (outward into communities, inward among peers) gives us a richer picture of what fellowship programs can accomplish when they’re designed to go deep.
The ERC Fellows have given the field a genuine contribution. Now it’s the job of each and every one of us to share, elevate, and build upon those lessons.
