One of the recurrent themes in the GoodWork® Project has been the demise of trustees: individuals within a profession who are well known, widely respected, and seen as being disinterested and nonpartisan. Veteran professionals mentioned trustees (like Edward R Murrow in journalism, or Edward Levi in the law), while younger professionals lamented the loss of mentoring and, more generally, of admired senior members of the profession. This finding has stimulated a set of studies of trust and trustworthiness.

The Trust & Trustworthiness Project involves studies of how young people think of issues of trust and trustworthiness in a media-drenched world, and how the trust conceptions of young people today compare with earlier times or earlier generations. We explore the role (if any) that trust plays when young people consider their goals, carry out their schoolwork, participate in different communities, and eventually take on new roles and responsibilities—particularly civic ones—in the broader society. With support from the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, we conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with young people, including a subset of civically engaged youth. A study of immigrant youth and trust is in the planning stages.

The ultimate goal of this project is to develop interventions to help young people understand issues involved in determining the trustworthiness of their fellow citizens, key institutions, and sources of information. We aim as well to nurture trustworthy individuals—literally, individuals worthy of trust—who can help to establish or re-establish powerful models of trust in their communities and on the national scene.