Abstract for: The Dynamics of Trust: Modeling Growth, Missteps, and Engagement in Community–Academic Partnerships

Trust is crucial to successful community-academic partnerships and so understanding how trust develops and under what circumstances is important. Understanding how to develop trust is an important skill for students seeking to work with community partners. I built a small system dynamics model that simulates major feedback dynamics governing trust in the context of community-academic partnerships. The model is informed by my own experience conducting community-engaged nutrition and public health research projects for more than 10 years. To date, I built a simple causal loop diagram that shows a dynamic hypothesis of trust development in the context of community-academic partnerships, and a simulation model to test scenarios of trust development over time. This work in progress describes a simple model that can be used as a teaching aid in courses related to community engagement. The model can also be developed further to contribute to a nuanced understanding of trust dynamics in the context of community-academic partnerships that I hope translates the cultivation of mindsets that increases the likelihood that community-academic partnerships will be successful and mutually beneficial.