[full website coming early 2025]
Trust Labs
We help communities build & stay in relationship,
especially when it’s hard.
We imagine a world where isolation and othering are the exception, not the expectation. We imagine a world in which everyone has the skills to do conflict well, to navigate through moments of rupture, to find pathways to repair, and to turn towards each other.
To make this possible, we must strengthen our muscles of connection and repair.
Who we are
Trust Labs is a think-and-do tank, accompanying the people committed to getting their community through hard moments.
We equip these 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.
Over the last decade, we've worked with partners looking to repair acute and historical ruptures, including the Archewell Foundation, Welcoming America, the Mayor’s Office of Erie, PA, the United Methodist Church, Oak Ridge Periodic Tables, the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project, Faith Matters Network, and more.
What we do
strategy & accompaniment
We are experts at helping you answer the question “what needs healing here?” In moments that feel stuck, or even intractable, we can support you in assessing the places that hurt. We bring a new perspective to the issue and work with you to develop a strategy that attends to those community pain points, adjusting and iterating with you along the way.
capacity building & training
We train you, your team, or your communities on the skills to diagnose and intervene in relational rupture or deficit. We treat such deficits as a leadership challenge that requires shifting the way we engage together at the root. You have the locally rooted knowledge. We have the expertise in diagnosis and facilitation to equip you with the skills to make progress on the challenges you and your community face.
keynotes & one-time events
You want to gather people from the community to move through a process of strengthening relational infrastructure or to learn more about the nuance of building lasting relationships. You need support in designing or facilitating this experience. Perhaps you don’t know who should be in the room, or how to get them there. Perhaps you don’t know what to say or do once people arrive at the event. This is our bread and butter. We partner with you to help design an event that will meet the needs you’ve identified and will facilitate this event to the extent that you wish.
our work
click a project title to learn more about our work.
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With support from the New Pluralists’ Healing Starts Here, we’re equipping a team of local leaders in Oak Ridge, TN with a process and tools to help their communities navigate hard conversations, and are enlisting a wide coalition of unusual bedfellows in the cause of connection through meals and social events that invite story-sharing. Through Oak Ridge Periodic Tables, we're hosting an inaugural Racial Justice Series with plans to scale it across the community, and building a learning cohort skilled in navigating rupture, modeled on our Brave Conversation Resourcers work. We’re now in Year 7 of the collaboration, and primarily serve in a coaching and resource-sharing role, supporting local leadership in implementation.
Learn more about the work Oak Ridge is doing here.
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We’re resourcing pastors across the Baltimore Washington Conference with tools and support to build sustaining relationships that endure through change and create real connections across lines of identity difference.
In response to a need for increased capacity to support congregations through moments of conflict, 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. These leaders were part of a 6 month training process and then bi-monthly cohort meetings from 2021-2023. Eight of them remain in a cohort that meets quarterly for coaching calls with our team. The denominational leadership can tap into this resource 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.
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Since June 2023, we’ve worked hand-in-hand with the Archewell Foundation to design and launch The Parents’ Network: a no-cost, private community for parents and caregivers bound by shared experiences of social media harm, centered on collective healing. Together, we’re working to equip families with safe, intimate spaces where you can talk openly with others who’ve been there, and elevate our collective voices to ensure no other family is forced to endure the same.
Our team spent the last decade building a scalable community of care for young grievers through The Dinner Party. Drawing on those principles and practices, we’re providing Archewell with a combination of strategy development and systems design; coaching, training, and community management support; and materials and resource development to ensure a seamless user experience for parents and caregivers.
Explore the Parents' Network here.
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The Connected Communities Cohort is a partnership with Welcoming America to design and facilitate a yearlong cohort of 17 civic leaders who wish to deepen trust and relationships between immigrants and non-immigrants in communities experiencing significant demographic shifts. The cohort gathers monthly for skill-building, case work, and design and implementation consultation in service of more comprehensive, strategic support of belonging at the local level.
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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’ve co-developed multiple resources that have been shared across their network, and led various trainings with hundreds of their members. In February, we led a teach-in for 74 educators on designing collective, school-based grief rituals.
Explore SCRR Resources:
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We are in the process of designing and facilitating a cohort of people (students/faculty/staff) from 5 colleges and universities across the country who are working to make progress on an issue of identity via a relational, reparative frame. We meet monthly to develop our capacity to effectively mobilize our communities towards living well together – navigating rupture and repair amidst the many pressures to discard one another. Through our work together, participants continue to advocate for the issues they care about, and design a new strategy or bolster existing advocacy work in service of deeper relationships, repair, and connection - even amidst conflict.
If you are interested in joining this cohort, please reach out or learn more here.
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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, authority, and loss might play into the intervention. We also shared skills to dig into the data behind our beliefs in service of deeper connection and curiosity.
Turning Towards:
An Experiential Learning Lab for Faculty, Staff, & Students Committed to Doing Conflict Differently
[applications due October 25!]
What to expect:
Monthly meetings to develop our capacity to effectively mobilize our communities towards living well together - navigating rupture and repair amidst the many pressures to discard one another.
In-person retreat (all expenses paid) to further deepen our skills and connection.
Accompaniment as you design a new strategy or adapt existing work in service of deeper relationships, repair, and connection - even amidst conflict.
What it is:
The Turning Towards cohort is a learning opportunity to bolster our capacity to mobilize relational change. We are inviting pairs of people (students/faculty/staff) from up to 5 colleges and universities across the country who are working to make progress on an issue of identity via a relational, reparative frame to join the experience.
Why now:
Our changemaking spaces are rife with despair, helplessness, and hopelessness.
In the urgency of action, we rarely have time to step back, to review our strategy and its broader implications, to do our own internal work and identify where our biases and assumptions are clouding our perspective, and to expand our options for changemaking on a collective and individual level. Our time together will offer just that.
What you’'ll learn:
Adaptive Leadership: Adaptive leadership is a framework that is inherently relational. It equips participants to navigate through uncertainty, builds their capacity to effectively diagnose and take action on a given challenge, and equips people to imaging into the worlds of the people they are trying to mobilize in service of sustained change. It is particularly well suited to challenges — like Israel/Palestine or political polarization — that seem intractable. Through experiential learning, a set of frameworks, and in-depth case consultations, participants will learn how to exercise relational leadership on particularly sticky issues.
The Art of Gathering and the Art of Staying: Once participants have deepened their diagnosis of their chosen identity-based issue on campus, we’ll help them co-design a set of interventions that involve pluralistic conversations with their campus communities. Cohort members will learn how to get the right people in the room, design a gathering that achieves what you want it to, hold conflict with care and rigor, and learn and iterate from the result.
Self-Attunement: Cohort members must be able to see their own triggers and activations in real-time and learn how to effectively renegotiate them so that they might stay in the game with people across a range of perspectives. We’ll therefore pepper the experience with moments of self-reflection and opportunities to get uncomfortable, inviting members to use their experiences as data for the collective, and do the inner work required to stay rooted in offering an alternative to the status quo of division, vitriol and dehumanization.
To Apply
Determine your focus. Consider an issue of identity that feels most live to you right now on your campus and that you would like to direct your energy towards through this cohort. This could be an issue that you have already done work on, or an issue that you care deeply about but are not sure how to make progress on. Live issues could include, but are not limited to: Israel/Palestine, racial justice, the US election and political polarization, and immigration.
Identify your collaborator. This work will be based on relationships. Please consider who you want to work with and develop your application together. We are specifically inviting people with identities directly impacted by your focus issue to apply so that you might have additional space and bolstering to aid your work. You and your partner may occupy distinct roles on campus (i.e. student/staff) or distinct identities related to your focus challenge (republican/ democrat; person of color/white person) or you may share an identity related to the work you want to further. While the application does ask you how your identities inform your work on this subject, the cohort experience will equip you to bring people beyond your duo into the work.
Apply as a team. Submit one application as a collaborator pair. We may be able to accept a limited number of 3-person collaborative teams. You do not need experience working together to qualify as an applicant.
** Note: this cohort will ask a lot of its participants - both in terms of time and emotional energy. We expect this to be a place to reconsider core sets of norms, attend to our own healing, and do the difficult work of leadership - which is always a choice. We anticipate that this experience will be challenging, and - at times - destabilizing. Given the very real pain of this moment, we recognize that this might not be the experience that each person wants or needs right now. If you aren’t certain about your own capacity for this - don’t hesitate to reach out to us for more information.
Timeline
October 25: Applications Due
October 28 - 31: Interviews with Trust Labs staff
November 8, 3 - 4:30 pm EST: Kickoff meeting (virtual)
December 13, 3-6pm EST: Deep dive into the heart of our projects + initial skill building (virtual)
January 9-12: In-person retreat (all retreat costs are covered by Trust Labs)
Spring Semester: monthly learning sessions; timing to be determined by the cohort
questions? email Maya at maya@wearetrustlabs.org
Our Team
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Founder & Executive Director
Lennon Flowers is hell-bent on creating spaces where humans can be human, out of a belief that nothing is done in isolation, and that healing is a collective enterprise. She's the founder and Executive Director of Trust Labs, which equips community stewards with tools, training & coaching, & peer learning networks in order to cultivate and sustain healthy spaces of belonging. Its flagship endeavor, The Dinner Party, is a platform where 20-, 30-, and early 40-somethings who’ve experienced a major loss can connect to one another, either one-to-one or in small, peer-led groups. 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.
Email her here: lennon@wearetrustlabs.org
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Senior Strategic Advisor
K (yes, just the letter!) has always been curious about community formation, people's stories, and what it takes to create a shared future where everyone is able to flourish. She's the Director of Partnerships at TDP labs: working around the country to help people build trust and connection to combat isolation and fragmentation in their communities. In recent years, she has led partnerships with Mayor of Erie, PA and the United Methodist Church, among others. When she's not at TDP, she is delighted by journaling, a good thrift find, her dogs, and her latest scheme (currently: a vending machine that vends local art!)
Email her here: k@wearetrustlabs.org
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Director of Curriculum
Maya Pace 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?
Email her here: maya@wearetrustlabs.org
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Senior Advisor
Mary supports The Archewell Foundation’s Parents’ Network, working hand in hand with the community management team on back-end systems-building. Mary spent several years leading community programs and engagement at The Dinner Party, a community of 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings who have experienced a major loss, and today, she helps organizations launch and sustain community-based, impact-driven initiatives. Her previous experience spans publishing and academia, and she holds a doctorate in the humanities from Yale University. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and dog, and would love to invite you over for homemade pizza.
Email her here: mary@wearetrustlabs.org
