Lunch & Learn: Community Trust – How to Build a Foundation for System Transformation

August 28, 2025

Systems change and trust must go hand in hand – it is not possible to change a system without tested input, but building trust to get that input requires changing the systems that negatively impacted families.

With trust being acknowledged as a cornerstone of system transformation, we opened our second Lunch & Learn of the 2025 season with some startling data shared by Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick: across the globe, CPS judges, workers and agencies are amongst the lowest trusted institutions, and in the USA this trust is even lower than in the majority of countries.

At Safe & Sound we work hard to earn trust from families in our community, but we also need to engender trust with organizations – those that fund our work, and those that we work in partnership with to ensure families can receive coordinated services across the city. And in turn, we need to trust communities to have the answers about what families need to thrive, to help shape and guide our work.

With that lens we opened an important discussion about building trust and transforming systems to better support families. We are grateful to our expert panel for joining Safe & Sound CEO Dr. Pegah Faed in this conversation:

Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick – Distinguished professor of Social Welfare and a Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
Ashley Downend – Senior Program Manager, Community Systems & Partnerships, Safe & Sound
Jason Sharpe – Fatherhood Engagement Specialist for the Fathers First program, San Diego County

Webinar recording (Video)

Discussion Highlights

Trust is about the distance between the behavior we see and the aspiration of what we expect or want to see – If there is a disconnect between experiences and the intention behind them, this can cause a lack of trust. For example, systems may aspire to be prevention focused and to center families. However, there can be structural reasons that cause systems to behave in ways that actually harm families and therefore engender distrust.
Trust is about seeing and appreciating fairness – We want our systems to behave in ways that we experience as fair, not capricious. However, there may need to be tradeoffs between the changes we need to make to make systems fair, and the impact of those decisions.
Lived experience is like a degree in something you can’t go to school for – Which is why it is so valuable to have lived experts as employees or advisors to Community Based Organizations (CBOs) so they can inform and lead the work. Truly listening to lived experience helps to create and revise programs so they genuinely work for families, and support is more valuable when it is reciprocal and rooted in understanding rather than top-down. However, to truly offer value, lived experts need to be supported to get additional qualifications and also not given job titles that set them apart from other colleagues that might bias perceptions.
Systems change needs to happen at macro, micro and meso levels simultaneously – Through individual transparent relationships, organizational shifts which are clearly communicated, and larger reforms such as the changes to mandated reporting. You can read more about mandated reporting changes here.
International comparisons demonstrate that whilst all countries have some form of child welfare system, the implementation varies wildly – In terms of the support offered to families, the threshold and definitions for intervention, and the level of trust in the system. These differences are embedded in culture and if changes are to take place, this will take time and some difficult decisions will need to be made.

Resources

Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick shared some slides containing data on the international landscape of trust in government generally, and particularly trust for child welfare services. Revisit the slides.

Lunch & Learn: Community Trust – How to Build a Foundation for System Transformation

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