Building Social and Public Trust
Distrust in social institutions undermines the ability of governments, businesses, and the media to serve citizens and to reduce divisions, unrest, and violence. Building social trust is crucial for enabling people to work together, solve major challenges, comply with laws, tolerate different views, and support their neighbors.
IREX takes proactive steps to build trust, as outlined in our Framework for Building Trust in Leaders and Institutions.
Our strengths include:
- Exchanges and dialogue: Helping communities find solutions to shared challenges
- Leadership development: Connecting leaders who capably and ethically serve their communities
- Institutional strengthening: Partnering with institutions to more effectively serve the public
- Media literacy: Building citizen resilience to misinformation and manipulative content
- Youth development: Empowering youth through new opportunities for education and employment
Helping communities find solutions to shared challenges
Through exchanges and dialogue, IREX fosters understanding between social groups to promote respect and tolerance. We are experienced in implementing exchange programs in which participants interact with people from different cultures.
We also implement programs that bring diverse groups of participants together to solve a common problem and build interpersonal trust.
Recent experiences:
- Global Solutions Sustainability Challenge
- Ford Foundation’s Global Fellowship Program
Connecting leaders who capably and ethically serve their communities
We draw upon our approach to cultivating leaders to address the global leadership deficit. We equip leaders with the tools to catalyze positive change and connect leaders to one another to achieve maximum impact.
Recent experiences:
Partnering with institutions to more effectively serve the public
We partner with governing, educational, and civic institutions to ensure they are providing solutions to problems that citizens face—a cornerstone of building trust. We do this by helping institutions synthesize and interpret data to ensure accountability, and by building local government’s capacity to meet citizens’ needs.
Sample programs:
Building citizen resilience to misinformation and manipulative content
Our media and information literacy programs empower individuals and communities to identify credible information to make decisions and to recognize and avoid manipulative information that erodes trust.
We help build demand for professional media by expanding peoples’ understanding of media processes and structures.
Sample programs:
Empowering youth through new opportunities for education and employment
Access to education and dignified work will be crucial to keeping youth engaged and fostering their trust in local institutions.
We use our youth approach to work with educators and governments through youth-focused programs to increase opportunities for education, engagement, and employment at scale.
Sample programs: