By John Martin
Communities with similar attributes sometimes have vastly different socioeconomic outcomes. One theory for what differentiates these communities is the trust earned by local leaders and institutions. To better understand why this may be, Reimagining the Economy welcomed Christy Gillenwater, the President and CEO of Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, and Matthew Lee, an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School, in discussion with Amy Holloway, Practitioner-in-Residence at RtE.
Holloway opened with the central question tackled in her book Trust Builders: why do some communities with similar initial conditions have such varying economic trajectories? In this book, she interviews local leaders to understand how leaders can repair, build, and maintain trust. From these interviews, she argued that local capacity is largely a function of trust, which is obvious in practice but is hard to see in datasets. A “local leader”, to her, is anyone who has impact on the community and economy, including but not limited to politicians, public and private business owners, and superintendents. These local leaders build trust when they are able to, consistently and with integrity, set aside personal agendas for the benefit of the community. Gillenwater is one of the local leaders embodying trust-building traits whose testimonial was included in the book.
Community Progress Moves at the Speed of Trust
Gillenwater has built trust across multiple communities. Trust, though, often takes decades to build. Gaining trust within a community can sometimes mean short-term losses, whether that be in political capital or the success of a company.
But how is this trust actually built? Gillenwater has found the most success in cultivating an “infrastructure of meetings”. She is very intentional about understanding who the local leaders in her community are, what they are individually best at, and how they can each collaborate to create the best outcome on big issues. On each of these big issues, she first finds the 3-6 best-equipped local leaders to understand the issue, and then decides how the meeting focus should vary with that group of individuals. This works because, to her, trust is a network. A key bottleneck in constructing an effective community plan is sometimes just getting the right people in the room at the right time.
Gillenwater has had success in many domains with this strategy. One such success story is in the resurgence of the Metro Area Projects (MAPs). This initiative, formed in the 1990s but emphasized only recently, publicly brings groups together to discuss and understand potential community projects. As a result, voter engagement is higher and projects typically have more than a staggering 70 percent approval. Specialized individuals come together to have an honest discussion about what needs to be done. Trust is built, and as a result communities are able to be responsive to change and thrive.
Trust Allows Communities to Obtain and Leverage Investment
We have seen Gillenwater’s success in Oklahoma City, but her experiences are also consistent with the latest academic research. Lee’s research, which is in this domain, focuses on how community ecosystems and coalitions work when solving complex problems. He did so by looking at a recompete program aimed at increasing prime-age (25-54) employment through local community projects. He found three main points of why some communities had success with this program while others did not.
- Organizational inertia: Coalitions that were able to collaborate to come up with solutions, rather than glom multiple programs into one, were most successful.
- Accounting: Accounting for the recompete is at the organizational level.
- Trust: Having pre-existing networks, rather than having to construct new ones, led to better outcomes with the program. In part, this is because trust is compounding; having baseline trust means you are better-positioned to obtain more trust.
There are multiple factors in why some communities effectively obtain and implement funding and others do not, and a central factor is trust. For this recompete, those that had trust were able to increase a 5-page proposal into 100 pages in a matter of months. Lee mentioned that “heroics” like Gillenwater are vital to this, and that not every community has a Gillenwater, because getting the right people in the room is hard. It is difficult to consistently convince leaders to attend meetings, but it is necessary to solve complex issues. To illustrate this, he brought up the example of an aircraft. It requires many specialists, relationships, and suppliers in a complex web to create the aircraft. We expect the benefits and solutions borne from complex relationships in the private industry, so it should not be unreasonable to expect these benefits from our government as well, as Gillenwater has done.
Lee finished with advice for people who want to be community leaders themselves. The ultimate goal, he said, is to build prosperity for people within a community. To best foster this goal, the most important trait is to be a true expert on something. It does not particularly matter what you are an expert on, and doing so will allow you to know who to mobilize and when given changing conditions. When many leaders focus on being experts in their domain, building their network of talented people, and are driven by the common goal of economic development, communities are able to thrive, as has happened in Oklahoma City.
