Trusted Space Partners

Welcome to Trusted Space, a partnership of experienced community builders who work to build effective approaches for exchange and relationship building between institutions and residents in communities across the United States.

Increasingly, local residents, and the institutions that support them, work in an environment of isolation and detachment from one another:

• Social service providers, public school teachers, housing managers and hospital administrators, to name a few, cannot achieve their missions without more engaged, trusting relationships with those they serve.

•  Place-based change efforts are limited in effectiveness without strong networks of trusting relationships across race, income, positional power and geographic lines.

Trusted Space invites partners to co-design and steward new tailored approaches for diverse networks to forge genuine trusted relationships.

Why? Because we desperately need those relationships in our communities, to solve problems, break down barriers, challenge traditional power structures, and to shape those creative, optimistic and aspirational solutions to 21st century challenges that our communities require in a fast paced, complicated world.

The Problem? There are few spaces where these connections, this kind of energy, and where the skills and muscles for behaving interdependently are cultivated.  The Solution? We can be much more intentional about creating the spaces we need in community.  Those moments and places that are comfortable and accessible for all of us to practice this behavior day in and day out, where the natural trust, generosity, curiosity and aspirational energy that you know exists in your community can drive positive change.

The Partnership has been established by Frankie Blackburn and Bill Traynor, 2 experienced community builders with over 60 years of work directly shaping , leading  and supporting unique community building efforts across the United States.