The Trust Project

Trust is essential for any relationship to flourish. Trust requires a shared language and shared goals. The same can be said about health. Health requires trust, a shared language, and shared goals. It requires a shared understanding. Health also requires knowledge. Some would categorize such knowledge as science. However, another pillar of trust, history, reveals that science is not enough to obtain health, especially when trust has been lost.

Hence, we have created a project whose central focus is to broaden the conversation about health through the lens of trust. We intend to focus on a bidirectional approach to health literacy. Our project will employ patients and physicians alike. You will hear and participate in a shared narrative of persons of color, poverty, affluence, high-educational achievement, privileged, and deprived. We will translate, redefine, code-switch, and code-break truths, lies, assumptions, facts, and fiction. We will create a common language of trust that will allow health to be spoken and lived equitably by all of its speakers.

Only together can we create a lexicon of trust that can universally define health.