Trust

22 November 2019

Mitchell Evans

It’s quite often said that trust can take a lifetime to develop and a moment to lose.

A few weeks ago a visitor asked what a tough day at Streetlevel looks like for me. After half jokingly saying “budgets and board meetings” I could sense they were perplexed when I shared that the days that are toughest for me are when my trust has been broken.

At Streetlevel we choose to start from a place of trust with everyone that walks through our doors. This means we work from a place of granting/choosing to trust everyone rather than expecting the worst of everyone as a baseline and having them earn our trust. We choose to have faith in the person that when given the opportunity they will choose to do their best.

We are not naïve that some people (for a range of reasons) will choose to abuse this trust, so we have boundaries in place to give everyone the best chance of succeeding.

Whenever we share this approach of granting trust to all the inevitable first follow up question we receive is – is this trust ever broken? The answer is Yes. This does happen from time to time. The second question is normally – What happens when trust has been broken? For us it’s a simple but powerful process. We address it, we choose to forgive, we put boundaries in place to position everyone to succeed and then we choose to trust again. This idea of “choosing to trust again” was even more confusing to my visitor.

The reality is if we chose to operate from a place where people have to earn our trust, we’d still experience instances of people breaking our trust. The big difference is by starting from a place where we grant trust rather than requiring community members to earn it you position yourself to see the best in people.

At Streetlevel we continue to see community members thriving and exceeding all expectations with the responsibility they’ve been entrusted with. For many this has been inside them all along but they’ve never been entrusted with the opportunity or responsibility to let it shine. All we do to activate this is choose to trust.