Trust for Civic Life Highlights How Local Leadership Builds Civic Trust

The Trust for Civic Life, a grantmaking collaborative sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, has released its second annual community survey report, The Local Advantage: How Community-Based Efforts Build the Trust and Agency America Needs, drawing on responses from over 1,000 rural community members across 24 communities. The report finds that trust in national institutions continues to decline, while trust in local institutions, particularly libraries, nonprofits, and community foundations, remains consistently strong, and that people feel the greatest sense of agency when they take on leadership roles within organizations working to solve concrete community problems. The findings also point to widespread informal bridge-building, with nearly half of respondents reporting they have taken some action to connect across political or social differences. These insights offer dialogue and deliberation practitioners concrete evidence that locally rooted, action-oriented organizing is what sustains civic trust and participation. The report reinforces NCDD's mission by demonstrating, with new data, why investment in local dialogue and collaborative problem-solving remains central to a healthy democracy.

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As confidence in national political institutions continues to erode, a new report from the Trust for Civic Life offers a different vantage point: the view from rural communities where trust, agency, and cooperation are not only intact but measurably strong. The Trust, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, conducted its second community survey in fall 2025, gathering responses from more than 1,000 people across 24 rural communities nationwide. The results build on a first-year survey and sharpen a central finding: communities that organize around solving shared, everyday problems generate trust and civic agency in ways that national institutions currently cannot.

The report's findings carry direct relevance for anyone working in dialogue and deliberation. Respondents reported the highest sense of agency not simply from volunteering more hours, but from taking on leadership responsibilities within organizations they believed were improving their community's quality of life. Libraries, nonprofits, and community foundations emerged as the most consistently trusted institutions across nearly all surveyed communities, each earning trust from more than 80 percent of respondents. Perhaps most notable for practitioners focused on bridging divides, nearly half of respondents said they had personally taken some action, often informal, to build common ground with people of different political backgrounds or life experiences.
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Taken together, these findings offer a data-backed case for the kind of work NCDD's network exists to support: local, relational, action-oriented civic engagement that rebuilds trust from the ground up rather than waiting for it to be restored from the top down. For dialogue and deliberation practitioners seeking evidence to inform program design, funding proposals, or community organizing strategy, the full report offers a detailed look at what is working and why. Readers can explore the complete findings at https://trustforciviclife.org/6-key-findings-from-second-community-survey-report/.