Building trust takes willingness. The perceived benefits of engaging with another in trust-building must outweigh the perceived risks. This is demonstrated by breeding practices of Emperor Penguins and group safety measures employed by Southern Pied Babbler birds. Growing trust requires discovery. Learning about risk, rules of engagement, and boundaries can gradually support predictive scenarios for trust-building. Nature’s wisdom is vast and the practice of biomimicry helps us identify lessons from nature to apply to our human systems. Our work in the Nature of Trust initiative to support a new “trust framework,” led by the good folks at Biomimicry for Social Innovation, is now pivoting to an applied space.

We are developing and testing tools that are designed to activate trust-building using these lessons from nature. For us, we are focusing on what it takes for health system leaders and community leaders to build trust — what willingness, discovery and familiarity look like in practice, specifically around decision-making for health resources. Our tools help leaders play together – an essential approach that enables learning, and assessing the benefit-risk calculation in ways that open new ways of partnering. Ultimately, we hope trust building sets an essential foundation of relationships for our work to expand community governance of health funding. This work is deeply relational, and the trust framework providing us with a creative and innovative approach to unlock resources for community-driven and owned initiatives.