TRUST LABS

ACCOMPANIES THE PEOPLE COMMITTED TO GETTING THEIR COMMUNITY THROUGH HARD MOMENTS.

We’re a think-and-do tank, equipping community stewards with tools, training, coaching, and peer learning networks in order to help communities be in (and stay in) relationship – especially when it's hard.

About us

It’s the event that no one came to.

It’s the elephant we let run rampant in the room.

It’s the transactional promises that go flat.

It’s the conflict that simmers in silence.

It’s the empty apology, or the refusal for repair, or the lack of tools to practice what we long for.

Often, what gets in the way of good ideas is not the idea itself, or systemic barriers — however mighty they may be. It’s a failure to build, move through, and sustain healthy relationships.  

That’s where we come in. 

We're experts in adaptive leadership and relational change. We help you identify where mistrust and misunderstanding are getting you stuck, and equip you with tools and strategies to cultivate the kind of connection and community that can withstand heat and the test of time. 

In the clinic of relationships, we’re the primary care physicians, helping triage amidst crisis or diagnosing underlying issues before they become emergencies. We work with you to determine the right interventions for healing and repair, trusting you are the expert on your own context.

What we offer

One-time event design & facilitation

Hosting a conference and want to talk about something more interesting than your business cards? We’ll help you design a conversation over a shared meal that invites participants to reflect on the themes of your gathering, and to spark meaningful connection and conversation that will help sustain relationships when your gathering ends. 

Training & leadership development

To transform our current challenges, we’ll need to look at them differently; acknowledging the relational roots of issues at hand. The good news? This leads to lasting impact. The hard part? We’ll all have to grow along the way. Using the adaptive leadership framework, we offer immersive training in relational change: how to correctly diagnose what’s got you stuck, how to approach conflict as an opportunity to dig in together, practical strategies to strengthen belonging, and identifying where you might be getting in your own way.

Design lab

We wouldn’t be good at our jobs if we weren’t also in the mess with you. That’s why, in addition to offering trainings and consulting services, we also take on a limited body of work where we can actively sit in the builder’s seat: cultivating deep, peer-driven communities of care at scale, where they’re needed most. 

Meet the team

We’ve built peer-to-peer networks that have forged face-to-face connection and community among tens of thousands of people. We’ve guided more than a dozen communities through moments of acute and historic rupture. Now we’re helping others do the same.


  • Lennon is hellbent on creating spaces where humans can be human, out of a belief that healing is collective and nothing is done in isolation. She previously launched and led The Dinner Party, a platform for connecting grieving 20-, 30-, and early-40-somethings, and The People's Supper, which builds trust and connection among people of different beliefs and experiences. She is an Ashoka Fellow, and her work has been featured on OnBeing with Krista Tippett, NPR’s Morning Edition, CNN, CBS This Morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other publications.

    She has a passion for communal living, backpacking, and good dance parties, and lives with her family in High Falls, NY.


  • Maya is from the redwoods of Northern California and grew up amongst a group of people dedicated to community and service. At Trust Labs, she designs and facilitates workshops on the adaptive challenge of belonging in a world that increasingly incentivizes isolation. Prior to this most recent chapter, she spent 6 months traveling across the US as a Harvard University Sheldon Fellow talking to people about how natural disaster has shaped their relationship to place and belonging. She graduated from Harvard Divinity School after working as the founding Chief Program Officer of Lead For America.

    Maya seeks to infuse her work with experimentation, learning, and practice around the orienting question: how do we live well together?


  • Anna is a Peruvian-Bolivian American leader working at the intersection of justice, politics, and healing. As Co-Founder of Our Own Deep Wells, she leads efforts to address the U.S. mental health crisis through soulful, community-centered practices. Previously, Anna served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) at the White House. A Harvard Divinity School graduate with a Master of Divinity, Anna dedicates her life to curating experiences for individual healing and collective action, believing that the combination of the two will lead to lasting social change. 

  • K has always been curious about people's stories and what it takes to create communities where everyone is able to flourish. She's a Senior Strategic Advisor at Trust Labs: leading partnerships with the Mayor of Erie, PA and the United Methodist Church, among others. When she's not at Trust Labs, she is delighted by journaling, a good thrift find, her dogs, and her latest scheme to connect with her neighbors (currently: a vending machine that vends local art!)

Resources

  • Pathways to Repair is an illustrated guide to the "landscape of repair," replete with metaphorical landmarks, exercises and reflection questions, and stories from our own lives, developed by Trust Labs, Faith Matters Network, and Center for Rural Strategies. 

    Too often, we and those in our communities have found ourselves ill-equipped to navigate the everyday bumps and bruises of relational work: the passing comment laced with an unintended barb; the passive-aggressive remark that barely disguises ill will; the casual dismissal of one's experience; an awkward silence followed by a subject change. On many occasions, those harmed must either swallow their hurt to remain involved, or extricate themselves. In other cases, a minor incident that could have been handled in the moment escalates into something bigger, leading to a group's dissolution or to a person’s banishment.

    Pathways to Repair is the product of a two-year learning journey with various experts in restorative justice, community accountability, and repair. The result is a collection of stories and lessons about repair, drawn from the experiences of those who have experienced harm and those who have caused it. We invite you to pick and choose the sections on the map that feel most resonant or useful, and to consider the exercises and reflection questions as you discern your own ways forward. 

  • The People’s Supper | Between 2017-2019, The People’s Supper brought more than 10,000 people together around dinner tables across the country. Over the years, we've partnered with dozens of local government and civic groups, faith-based organizations and communities, colleges and universities, and workplaces, including the Mayor's Office of Erie, PA, the Obama Foundation, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, Silver Thread Public Health Department, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

    TBH, we don’t get around to updating the website much these days, but we encourage you to check out our resource page. Here you’ll find tips on how to invite people to talk openly about the things that matter most, using story-sharing to provide the foundation for understanding and repair. Our resources have been downloaded and used by thousands of people, ranging from mayors to student leaders, looking to gather differently.

  • (Re)connecting to place: Strategies for strengthening civic infrastructure | Designed for civic leaders and community stewards, this guidebook offers a variety of strategies to deepen connection to the places we call home, whether as a means of narrowing the gap between civic leaders and the people they serve, of cultivating repair and moving from destructive conflict into its more generative form, or simply of fostering positive sources of social connection and deepening trust among neighbors, particularly across lines of difference. We call that the work of "strengthening civic infrastructure". You’ll find strategies to meaningfully bring people together — whether offline or online —  and how to tend to the things that often get in the way, in ways that can be easily adapted and tailored to the specific needs of your community. 

    The guidebook is divided into four parts: 

    • Getting clear on your purpose (Why);

    • Understanding who needs to be in the room & how to get them there (Who); 

    • Creating the container, with tips on why & how to create a shared meal (What); and 

    • Facilitation tips and strategies on the art of holding space (How)

Contact us

Council on Foundations’ Building Together conference

In May 2024, we hosted a People's Supper for 300 attendees of the Council on Foundations' Building Together conference. Anchored on the theme of "Leading Together Across Differences," the conference brought together philanthropic leaders from across the country, all interested in developing the strategies and skills to productively navigate differences in service of the greater good. 

Before the gathering, we provided a one-hour training to 30 "Table Hosts," sharing a primer on the art of holding space and what it takes to create a container that can hold mutual vulnerability. We worked with the team to craft questions that tied the experience back to the conference themes, and afforded participants an opportunity to move from theory to practice.

We opened the kick-off dinner with a set of framing remarks, sharing learnings from our work in places ranging from Fort Cavazos to a college campus, reeling from the war in Gaza and Israel. We invited participants to use the evening's conversation as a chance to notice their impulse to make assumptions, and instead lean into curiosity; to resist the narrative that not knowing is the same as not caring; and to tell the truth about the places we get stuck. 

In follow-up surveys, the experience was rated as the highlight of conference.

Helping practitioners practice what we preach at the Building Connected Communities conference

Too often, as leaders in the field, we spend our time talking about connection without actually experiencing it. In doing so, we miss a critical opportunity to forge deeper relationships with other potential allies and co-conspirators whose names we’ve known only in passing, and to hone the very same muscles we ask others to exercise.

In the Fall of 2023, the Foundation for Social Connection hosted the Building Connected Communities conference at Harvard University, bringing together hundreds of the nation’s leading researchers and practitioners working to address the loneliness crisis. 

We hosted a lunch-time conversation, as a chance for participants to step beyond their CVs and share the stories that make us who we are. We trained a dozen participants as “Table Hosts,” offering a quick primer on the art of holding space and how to move a group of intellectuals from a head-space to a heart-space (and why that matters). In addition, we shared a set of tools to accompany the Foundation for Social Connection’s newly launched Action Guide, to help participants take the experience back to their home communities.

Sparking conversation and connection through workshops, keynotes, and dinners

We love working with groups to design and facilitate one-off events or workshops in service of deeper connection. A few examples are below: 

Council on Foundations

We were invited by the Council on Foundations to attend their yearly meeting and offer a moment of connection, deepening, and skills building for philanthropists that are often pushed to be in “do” mode. We designed a conversation and dialogue session, preceded by a brief talk about the principles of gathering and connection, that allowed participants to enrich their understanding of one another. 

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

We led a workshop exploring the tactics of crucial conversations in service of diversity and equity. The interactive session equipped participants with diagnostic skills to understand what sort of conversation would make progress on a given issue, and how power and authority and loss might play into the intervention. We also shared skills to dig into the data behind the belief in service of deeper connection and curiosity.

In partnership with writer/director Sean Donnelly (The Lady and the Dale, The American Dream & Other Fairy Tales), we've been following David with a camera in real-time, on a hunch that this quirky conservative pastor of a small purple church comprised of self-described misfits was a story worth following. We aim to use the story and accompanying materials as a call-to-action and an examination of the challenges, limitations, and best practices for those wishing to build meaningful layers of multiracial, ideologically, and generationally diverse community. 

We’re now in Year 8 of the collaboration, and primarily serve in a coaching and resource-sharing role, supporting local leadership in implementation.

Uncovering hidden histories in Oak Ridge, TN  

In 1942, the government seized 60,000 acres in eastern Tennessee, turning a farming community into the city of Oak Ridge. Used to develop enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, the city was dubbed the “Secret City”. Over 18 months, 75,000 residents moved to Oak Ridge. Residents were forbidden from keeping journals; cameras were banned; mail was opened and censored. Scientists didn’t talk to engineers, & engineers didn’t talk to laborers. Secrecy was paramount. Today, those restrictions no longer exist, but the legacy of secrecy, segregation, and mistrust persists.

Like the American story itself, it’s a story defined no less by its hidden histories and the many voices that weren’t heard. In 1955, 85 Black students from the neighborhood of Scarboro became the first to enroll in an all-white school in the southeast. The students were banned from playing sports, or engaging in extracurriculars. They were called names and met at moments with hostility. But the integration otherwise took place without major incident, and was soon forgotten, even by many within the town.

In 2018, we began working with Reverend David Allred and the local Ministerial Association to bring together folks across racial, political, socioeconomic, generational, and religious differences, with the goal of building trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Together, we set out to answer a single question: What do Oak Ridgers wish to be known for over the next 75 years? That question could not be answered by one voice, or one institution. It requires enlisting the many hidden voices — and hidden lives — that comprise the town.

Since then, thousands of Oak Ridgers have sat down for conversations across difference, thanks to Oak Ridge Periodic Tables. The toolset is one that's been used by dozens of partner nonprofits and civic organizations, all with a focus on what it means to reclaim our hidden histories. We've hosted conversations on everything from racial justice to lifting up the stories and voices of those living with disabilities, to efforts to rebuild in the wake of the opioid crisis.

Supporting grieving educators with the School Crisis Recovery + Renewal project 

Between 2021-2023, we worked with the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project to distill a set of practices that aim to rehumanize the educator grief healing process, by hosting educators in co-created, supportive, and regenerative spaces. We co-developed multiple resources and led trainings on the content with hundreds of their members. Those resources included:

  • Creating & Holding Space for Ourselves & Each Other, a guide designed for educators who wish to grow their skills, knowledge, and practice when it comes to talking openly about loss. In it we offered a series of reflection exercises and principles and practices of collective healing, in order to help educators explore the impact of student death and other school-based crises, and to integrate those experiences into their personal and professional development. 

  • Creating the Container is a guide and accompanying set of workshops aimed at helping educators design collective rituals to metabolize grief together as a school team, community, and culture.

Our joint work was featured in the Journal of Trauma Studies in Education, in a 2024 article on the science of collective healing. In it, the authors share a five-part framework for collective healing in school settings, drawn from our collaboration.   

Training city government & nonprofit leaders working to strengthen local belonging efforts for immigrants

In partnership with Welcoming America, we designed and launched the Connected Communities Cohort, a yearlong leadership development program for 14 civic leaders who wish to deepen trust and relationships between immigrants and non-immigrants in communities experiencing significant demographic shifts. 

Our work begins by helping cohort members understand the relational deficits that regularly impede their ability to make meaningful progress on their efforts to advance belonging. 

Using the adaptive leadership framework, we examine our biggest sources of resistance, and our own pieces of the mess. We help cohort members reflect on and honestly answer questions like, "Who do I find it difficult to talk to and why?," "What might be at loss for them and for me?," and "How do I increase my capacity for heat?," and share practical tools to help us lead more effectively through moments of rupture.

The cohort continues to gather monthly for skill-building, case work, and design & implementation consultation in service of more comprehensive, strategic support of belonging at the local level.

Equipping pastors to shift stuck conflict and build muscles for repair with the BWC - United Methodist Church

From 2020-2024, we worked closely with the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church to equip clergy and lay leaders in the art of congregational repair. 

The Conference came to us looking for ways to increase capacity to support congregations through moments of conflict. The responsibilities of ministry are many: To provide a moral compass, applying theological texts to the everyday questions we face today; accompanying congregants through all of life's highs and lows, from birth to death; and, when necessary, guiding their communities through moments of rupture. It's a lot for one person, or even a team of people. And when the source of conflict involves the pastor themselves, their role as chaplain and facilitator becomes murky. Meanwhile, those at the Conference level, overseeing a wide network of urban, suburban, and rural churches -- were likewise often overstretched. 

Following a recruiting and selection process, we trained 15 clergy and lay leaders with the tools necessary to help those congregations have brave conversations in service of  repair and advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. We wanted equip them with tools and support to build sustaining relationships that endure through change, and to create real connections across lines of identity difference. 

That team, which we called “Brave Conversation Resourcers,” guided a handful of churches through a series of community-wide dinners, designed to unearth hard-to-talk-about subjects pertaining to their own efforts to advance multicultural ministry. In addition, they provided 1:1 coaching for more than 100 ministers, many of whom are sitting in what are called “Cross-Racial, Cross-Cultural” appointments. 

The denominational leadership can now tap into the Resourcer pool for anything from congregational conflict response to phone call check-ins with newly placed pastors within the first 6 months of their start date.

Translating social connection into systems-change: Mayor’s Office of Erie, PA   

A 2017 USA Today article named Erie, PA as the worst place in America for African Americans to live. We teamed up with the Mayor’s Office on a series of racial healing suppers. Over the course of six months, a mix of racially and ethnically diverse civic leaders — 80 in all — sat down for a seven-part series of bridging suppers across racial difference, and affinity suppers among folks who shared a common identity.

THE ISSUE: The Black community had been invited to too many dialogue circles before, and nothing had changed. They needed to know that the Mayor’s team was serious about addressing the inequities that were driving the city's racial divisions.

THE GOAL: At the end of the series, participants would come up with action steps to make Erie more equitable, based on the themes and stories they’d heard around the table. Those action steps would become the framework for the city's diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work, to be led by the Mayor's Office.

Getting people to the first dinner — and the six that followed — didn’t require knowing what all of the outcomes would be. But it did require a promise and a plan to translate the stories shared around a table into action.

THE OUTCOMES: The projects that emerged included:

  • a new workforce development initiative

  • a multimillion dollar college scholarship fund for students in Erie

  • cultural competency training for all public works employees

We spent the next year-and-a-half working with the Mayor’s team and a group of participants from the supper series to put those ideas into practice.

Building a scalable community of care for parents who’ve experienced social media harm 

We're helping the Archewell Foundation design and build The Parents' Network, a no-cost, private community for parents and caregivers bound by shared experiences of social media harm, focused around collective healing. 

Parents in the network share a range of experiences. Many have lost a child and are working together to navigate grief and everything that comes with it. Others have children who have experienced near-fatal harm, or are actively struggling with present-day issues of cyberbullying, depression and anxiety, sexual exploitation, eating disorders, and a range of other traumas related to social media use.

Some are seeking ways to channel pain into purpose. Some are simply trying to survive – while ensuring  our kids do the same. All are seeking safe, supportive environments where they can talk openly about experiences often kept under lock and key, and forge meaningful relationships with others who understand.

Our work includes everything from managing a team of fellow parents who provide operations and member support, to equipping parent leaders in the art of holding space. In addition, we built and manage the back-end data and communications systems to ensure a seamless user experience that can scale over time.