Enabling Trust
Temporary solidarity often emerges from mission-related goals, like specific state policy changes or social/environmental actions. Here, we draw wisdom from unions and other large scale and fast acting movement builders, as listeners and participants among hundreds or thousands of people who do not necessarily know each other.
In our own work, we wonder about sustained solidarity, which ideally lasts through change and is built on personal trust and love. In sustained solidarity, we need to know that people have our backs even when times are tough and will find ways to act where they can around our personal needs, too. While large scale and fast acting movements have this seed at the center, can it, too, be scaled?
Many groups design relationship building activities (like ice breakers, retreats, and workshops) to help us have more intimate conversations, which is necessary for trust to grow. But especially in organizational systems of labor, planned activities cannot make up for the fact that few of us are truly secure at work or can turn to colleagues for help when we are most vulnerable. They cannot make up for the fact that it is scary to put your livelihood on the line in solidarity with a colleague who is more vulnerable.
Instead of trying to build trust as an activity, we seek to build solidarity infrastructure: systems in which trust can naturally occur and relationships last beyond the job title of the moment. For example, we’re asking what it looks like to foster a sustainable organization in which:
No one gets “fired,” and no one is obligated to work beyond capacity.
We embrace real talk — including direct communication about our needs, expectations, boundaries, and differences, and a willingness to get through, not around or away from, conflict.
Mutual aid is centered — recognizing that there are some things, like health costs, that cannot bypass traditional currency.
