In our quest for transformation—especially inside institutions—we often prioritize strategy, measurement, and momentum. But what’s often missing is sustenance. And not just food-on-the-table sustenance. I mean the deeper kind: the thing that keeps people tethered to the work when results lag and the path gets muddy.
That thing, more often than not, is trust.

Not performative alignment. Not institutional buy-in. Real trust.
The kind that’s built slowly, relationally, and often invisibly.
The kind that lives in the in-between moments—at lunch tables, in late-night texts, in the pause before the reply. The kind that says: you matter, and I’m here, even when the work isn’t working.
That kind of trust is often missing in higher education.

In our 2022 research study, Please Mind the Gap, conducted with 51 high-achieving students across the country, we explored what trust in higher education really looks like—and what erodes it. Only 41% of Gen Z respondents said they tend to trust colleges and universities. Among Black students, the mistrust was even more pronounced, citing alienation and a persistent lack of belonging.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a pattern:
When initiatives fail, it’s rarely because the strategy was weak.
It’s because trust wasn’t there.
Or it was stretched too thin. Or it was treated as optional.

How many work-arounds have you figured out just to get the job done? “She doesn’t listen.” “He refuses to budge.” “They never do what’s asked of them.” In one organization, we mapped out an elegant plan for student engagement. On paper, it looked promising—consultative feedback loops, participatory governance structures, regular convenings.

And yet, the work floundered.

Not because the architecture was flawed—but because trust hadn’t been tended at the ground level. Students didn’t believe they were being heard. Staff didn’t believe their vulnerability would be protected. Leaders didn’t trust what they heard from students enough to change.

Without trust, the structure was just scaffolding. Empty, brittle, easily blown down.

Students in our research expressed something similar. One student said, “They’re not listening to us. If there’s still power dynamics, we’re not going to get our voices out.” Others talked about building trust with individual staff members—especially those who shared their identities or experiences—even as institutional trust eroded.
Trust doesn’t live in dashboards. It doesn’t conform to quarterly metrics. But it’s the very thing that allows those metrics to ever be met.

In a chapter of my upcoming book, I talk about the danger of treating trust as a transaction. When we extract stories, ideas, or participation—or demand performance and accountability—without building genuine relationships, we turn nourishment into depletion. We turn sustenance into scarcity.

We see it everywhere:
• In student surveys that never close the loop.
• In community advisory boards that are thanked but not heeded.
• In collaborations where the timeline matters more than the tenderness required.

Extraction is easy. Sufficiency is harder. And the students we listened to know this. They spoke of burnout, invisibility, and “free emotional labor”—all consequences of being asked to perform trust without receiving it in return. As one student said, “We were extremely overworked… and we didn’t get paid for the first year”.

Sufficiency demands that we slow down long enough to ask:
• What do these relationships need to thrive?
• Where does trust need tending?
• How do we know when enough extraction has already happened—and we need to move into restoration?

If we want change that lasts—change that nourishes rather than depletes—we need to design for trust from the start. Not just as a value, but as a daily practice. Not just as a KPI, but as a relational ethic. Not just as something we build once, but something we feed again and again—especially when it’s inconvenient.

This was a central learning in our participatory design studio: trust isn’t abstract. It’s rooted in five key drivers—relational depth, transparency, time investment, financial clarity, and student validation. Together, we called them the Trust Wheel, a framework for designing institutions that don’t just invite student voice, but honor it.

Trust isn’t a stepping stone to “real” work.
It is the work.
Because trust is sustenance.
And without it, the work starves.