until there’s
Working Together to Transform
Foster Care Where You Live
Foreword by Bishop Aaron Blake
TRUST FALL chapter eleven
Building
trust with others is essential to putting together the foster care puzzle in your community.
“Raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies are the main reason I have trust issues.”
Chapter 11 Trust Fall
ANONYMOUS
If you’ve ever been to summer camp, completed a ropes course, or participated in a corporate team-building exercise, there’s a fair chance you’ve participated in a trust fall. You know the drill. You stand on top of something with your arms across your chest. Several people—friends, colleagues, or people you don’t know at all—lock arms on the ground below you. You may even be blindfolded. Then the moment comes, and you slowly fall backward into a net of human arms. If you haven’t been a jerk to those folks all week, chances are the arms will hold your weight, and everyone will cheer wildly. If you have been a jerk—well, good luck, partner.
If you could find a way to build trust and work together, you’d help far more children and families than you ever could by doing your own thing.
People come into your world with varied capacities for trust. Some trust easily—at times too easily. For others trust doesn’t come easily at all. Our individual capacity to trust is likely linked to our personality and past experiences. Every significant human interaction we have provides an opportunity to either build upon or destroy our own capacity to trust, a bit at a time. This also means that every interaction we have with another person is a powerful opportunity to negatively or positively influence that person’s capacity to trust. This isn’t only about building their trust in you. More importantly, it’s about the role you play in their capacity to trust others. If they lose trust
in you, they will be less likely to trust the next person they meet. But if you’re trustworthy in your relationships, you help people build healthy, trusting relationships with others.
This is tremendously important in all human interactions. Whether you’re a foster parent attempting to build trust with the children in your home, a social worker building trust with a family, or an administrator or manager building trust among your staff, the importance of fostering trust in your relationships cannot be overstated.
It can be particularly challenging to develop trust when collaborating with other organizations, agencies, and communities of faith to serve children and families in your community. Collaboration is essential to making the biggest possible impact in the foster care space. However, collaboration comes with many challenges. Perhaps the most significant is in your attempt to build trust.
Trust can be difficult to build in collaborative relationships in this space for a few reasons. Some may sound familiar to you:
1. You want to collaborate with other organizations but find yourselves competing for the same government contracts, donors, and community partners. If you help others win, it feels as if you lose.
2. You want to collaborate with others who are doing similar things, but you’re pretty sure you’re doing it more effectively than they are. Why wouldn’t everyone join forces with your organization since you’re clearly doing a better job?
3. There are people in your community who would be good to collaborate with, but let’s be honest: you just don’t like them that much. They can be annoying, overbearing, or selfish.
All of these would be understandable reasons not to collaborate with others except for one crucial reality: if you could find a way to build trust and work together, you’d help far more children and families than you ever could by doing your own thing. When we don’t work together we duplicate efforts, miss opportunities, and lose out on information that could improve outcomes many times over. Put in another, less positive way: if we don’t work together, we hurt the very kids and families we could help. And so, it starts with you. You can’t magically make everyone else a trust-builder. But you can be one. You can make deliberate commitments to help others build trust in you and grow their capacity to, in turn, trust others.55
Five Types of Connection in a Collaboration
Imagine for a moment that every person you know in your community who is working on foster care is spread out in a large grassy area at a park. Now imagine that each person is connected to various others by something that represents the strength of their relationship. Some might not know each other at all and therefore have nothing connecting them, while others who have briefly met might be connected by single-ply gas station toilet paper. At the other end of the spectrum you notice that some people in the group are connected by sturdy
rope. This represents a picture of the foster care network in your community and provides a helpful picture of the trust that exists among the various individuals trying to work together. Let’s look at each of the five types of connection and what is true of those relationships:
Connection Type Description
No
Connection
“I have not met this person.”
Acquaintance “I’ve met this person but do not work on anything with them.”
Collaborator “I work with this person on one or more projects.”
Ally “I depend on this person regularly for important input and advice.”
Friend “I can reliably count on this person, and we have developed a high degree of trust.”
Connected by
Nothing
Toilet Paper
Ribbon
Yarn
Rope
Our goal in collaboration is to always be moving each relationship within the network to the next deeper level of connection and trust. In other words, over time in each of your relationships, you are trying to strengthen your connectivity from toilet paper to rope.
One helpful exercise is to list ten key leaders in foster care in your community. Next to their names, indicate which of these levels best describes your relationship with them. Then write down one action next to each name that could help you move toward a deeper level of trust and connection with them. This might start with grabbing coffee, showing up at one of their events to support them, or resolving a past misunderstanding. There are lots of ways to build connection. No matter how you do it, always be making rope.
Building Trust Together
While there are no shortcuts to building trust, there are actions that can help facilitate it. One of the most helpful tools I’ve come across is a set of principles I learned from North Point Church just outside of Atlanta.
Lesli Reece, who led the foster care ministry there for years, created a document for their partnerships. Every time Lesli initiated a relationship with another organization, she would provide a document containing a set of trust principles and tell the new partner that she was committed to these principles in that relationship. Our team has adapted these principles, added one, and explained each briefly below:
1. When I’m confused about something you’ve said or done, I’ll choose to believe the best.
Sometimes things happen that are neither clearly wrong nor blatantly hurtful. Maybe they’re just a little confusing. Perhaps a meeting was called, and you weren’t invited, or a decision was made that didn’t consider your input or feelings. Maybe
you received an email that felt a little cold. Is there anything here to confront someone about? Maybe, but probably not. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that others have tons of things going on in their lives and in their heads, almost none of which has anything to do with you, and that any troubling action on their part was most likely not done maliciously. If there is any way for you to make a decision to trust and believe the best, everyone will be better off. If you just can’t shake that uncomfortable feeling or impression and think there may be something more going on, see #2.
2. When hard things happen between us, I’ll come directly to you.
It’s easy to talk to someone outside the situation about how you have been hurt or offended, but it is tough to speak directly to the person who is the source of that hurt. While it might not always go well, relationships and collaborations are often saved and can be strengthened through gracious and direct conflict resolution. Rarely does talking to third parties about a perceived offense strengthen a relationship. It also damages the trust you might have with the person(s) you are talking to. After all, if you’re talking negatively to me about someone else, who is to say you aren’t talking negatively about me to others?
3. When you come directly to me, I will listen and take responsibility for my mistakes and broken commitments. Nobody likes to be confronted. And rarely, when confronted, do we feel the accusations to be one hundred percent accurate.
However, we can make real progress if we commit to listening well without immediately becoming defensive. While you may not be totally or exclusively responsible for whatever it is you are being confronted about, look for any amount of truth in what’s being said. And when you see that truth, take responsibility for it. If we focus on taking responsibility for the critiques that are accurate and resist the temptation to dwell on the criticisms that aren’t, everyone will be better off.
4. When others speak negatively about you, I will share your strengths with them and encourage them to go directly to you (see #2).
When someone approaches you to talk about someone else, sometimes their intention is blatant mudslinging. But more often than not, it comes through more subtly. It might start with “I need your advice about working with (fill in the blank).” Or it could begin with, “(Fill in the blank) is a great person— llove them to death. It’s just that I’m concerned that . . .”
So, what can we do when we see this coming? When I hear those words, I sometimes respond with something like, “That must be frustrating. But knowing (fill in the blank), I’d be surprised if they wouldn’t be willing to discuss that with you. I’ve always found them to be super approachable.” By doing this you have (1) validated the person talking to you without joining them in negative talk, (2) affirmed the person being discussed, and (3) redirected the person with whom you are speaking back to the individual who can bring resolution to the situation.
5. When good things happen, I’ll share credit with you and others.
Sharing credit with others in front of donors, other organizations, and the press accomplishes two things. First, it is simply truth-telling. Nothing worth doing gets accomplished without some kind of help from others. You’re not making something up just to make someone else feel good but merely acknowledging that someone else’s contribution helped make winning possible. Second, when a community partner hears that you’ve spoken positively about them in public, their trust in you grows exponentially. Of course, you don’t do this to make them trust you. You do it because it’s the right thing to do (I’ll go into more detail about credit-sharing in Chapter 13).
It’s important to note that Lesli never asked the other person to sign the document. She merely gave them a document communicating the principles that would govern her actions. Sometimes people appreciated it, while others weren’t sure what to think (after all, most people aren’t accustomed to this kind of transparency).
On one occasion Lesli gave the document to an administrator with the county. She was one of the people who wasn’t sure what to make of it, but she accepted it and went on with the conversation. Months later this administrator approached Lesli and told her that, based on that document, she had something she needed to talk about. She had been at one of the events the church was hosting and had overheard a foster mom sharing details of a case with another woman there. She was concerned that this woman might have been
breaking confidentiality. When they investigated further, however, they quickly learned that the other woman was part of that foster family’s support community and was officially cleared to receive those details. Problem solved.
Without such principles governing the relationship, it would be easy for us to imagine what might have happened instead. This administrator might have told her colleagues that church members were sharing confidential details. Eventually, that allegation could have mushroomed into a much larger conflict, destroying the partnership altogether. That kind of thing happens all the time and has sabotaged many collaborative efforts, with tragic consequences for the children and families that could have benefited from those efforts. We owe it to the children in our community to protect our collaborative relationships with others. They depend on us to act like adults.
Making these five commitments to the people in your life will significantly improve the strength of your relationships. You likely have more power than you know, including the ability to substantially impact, either negatively or positively, another’s capacity to trust in others. If you leverage your power to build trust with collaborative partners in your community, you will accumulate great friends. But most importantly, more children and families will get the help they need.
For a free downloadable version of these trust principles that you can print out and give to potential partners, go to https://cafo.org/ morethanenough/resources/ .
Until There’s More than Enough is a faith-based field guide for collaborative foster care transformation in your community. The words "NOT ENOUGH" are heard every day inside of our nation's foster care system . . . Not enough resources. Not enough support. Not enough families.
But it doesn’t have to be that way where you live. If you were to find and effectively collaborate with the right people, your county could go from “not enough” to “more than enough.” This book will help you lay the essential groundwork to see that happen.
Gleaning from the experience of dozens of government, nonprofit, and faith leaders from across the country, Until There’s More than Enough represents a set of principles and practices that will help advocates, churches, and organizations in your community work together to transform foster care.
More than enough for kids and families before, during, and beyond foster care can happen where you live. Believe it’s possible. Do your part. Do it together.