Before there was a charity, a mentorship organisation, or anything with a name or a registration number, I was paying school fees for children I had never met.
I grew up attending a government secondary school in Nigeria where the fees were meant to be affordable, and mostly they were, though even for my family, it was a little stressful to pay it every term.
My father was in leadership at a different secondary school, and through him I saw the panic that set in every term, when fees were due. Bright students who had done the work and earned their place would suddenly face the possibility of not being allowed to sit their exams. The school fees were less than two pounds, but that was enough to determine whether a child could sit their exams. I watched staff like my dad, who were not wealthy themselves, paying out of their own pockets because they could not stand by and watch.
So over ten years ago now, I started doing mini outreaches to raise school fees. I would post on Twitter and tell people what was happening, what the fees cost, and what I would do with whatever they sent. And people I had never met sent money, not once but termly. I would go to the school, ask for the highest-performing students who could not pay, settle their fees, and send the receipts back. There was no formal structure or monitoring and evaluation framework. It was just me saying, "this is what I will do with what you give me," and strangers trusting that I would do it.
That was over a decade ago and it is still happening. Money still arrives for school fees and I still send it along and children still go to school because of it. The charity I went on to co-found now supports 100 widows monthly and funds children through school. Over time, people have contributed funds unprompted, not because I have asked but because they see what the charity does and trust what it stands for. That pattern — people choosing to give without being asked — did not come from a fundraising strategy. In fact, we are only creating one now. It came from years of doing what I said I would do, visibly and consistently, until trust became its own invitation.
Trust is not simply a value; it is an asset you do not own. You can only earn it, steward it and protect it.
I think about this often because every organisation I have worked inside or alongside talks about trust as though it were a value, something they believe in and print on the wall and reference in their strategy documents. But what I learned from paying school fees with strangers' money is that trust is not simply a value; it is an asset you do not own. You can only earn it, steward it and protect it. It is one of the materials your organisation is built from, and when it cracks, everything above it shifts. The damage may not be visible for months or years, until eventually something comes crashing down.
The gap nobody measures
The place where cracked trust does its most damaging work is rarely where leaders expect. It is not in the press or on social media. It is inside the building, among the people delivering the mission. When staff stop trusting leadership, they do not walk out. They perform. They say the right things in meetings, hit the metrics being measured, align their language with the strategy document, and withhold the truth about what is and isn't working — the one thing that would actually move the organisation forward.
I have watched this happen in more than one organisation. The gap between what people say in the room and what they say after the room empties is one of the clearest indicators of organisational health, and it is almost never measured. Leaders who believe their teams are aligned because nobody is openly disagreeing may be running organisations where the cost of honesty has become too high. That is not a culture problem in the way most organisations understand culture problems. It is a trust failure, and trust failures are operational failures. When the people closest to the work cannot be honest about the work, the damage accumulates invisibly until something collapses in a way that is suddenly very visible indeed.
Personal trust and institutional trust
The distinction I want to draw here is between personal trust and institutional trust, because they work differently even though they are ultimately built from the same thing. The trust people placed in me as a young woman collecting school fees on Twitter was entirely relational. They knew my name, they could see my track record, they trusted me as a person. Institutional trust works differently because it has to survive beyond any single individual. It is built on systems, on consistency between what an organisation says and what it does, on accountability structures that make promises enforceable rather than aspirational.
What connects them, and what I think most organisations get wrong, is that institutional trust is not a replacement for personal trust. It is personal trust scaled up and made durable through systems. The point of those systems is not to replace the human relationship that created trust in the first place. It is to make the organisation worthy of trust even when the individual who first earned it is no longer in the room. And when the systems stop reflecting what the people inside them actually believe and practise, the institution is running on borrowed credibility, spending down a balance it is no longer replenishing.
Trust also determines what people are willing to give an organisation. When it is strong, those things move more freely. When it is weak, people begin to withhold them.
Trust also determines what people are willing to give an organisation. Staff give you the truth. Donors give you money. Communities give you access to their lives. Partners give you their credibility. When trust is strong, those things move more freely. When it is weak, people begin to withhold them. That is why I think of trust as infrastructure rather than sentiment. It determines what can move through an organisation.
The deepest breach
This is especially dangerous in international development, where the trust organisations ask for is not the ordinary commercial kind. Development organisations ask communities to trust them with something profoundly intimate. Their stories, their children's faces, their grief and vulnerability and the worst moments of their lives. And the way much of the sector handles that trust should trouble anyone paying attention.
A consent form signed in a village where the power dynamics between an international NGO and a local family are so lopsided that "consent" barely captures the reality is not enough. It is paperwork dressed up as ethics. I have seen organisations that would never publish a staff member's medical history without consent circulate a child's image of visible distress across donor communications, social media, annual reports, and campaign materials without the family knowing how far the image would travel. That is not just an ethical failure in the abstract. It is a specific betrayal of a specific trust, and it has consequences.
Communities talk to each other. When one family's story is used in ways they did not expect or agree to, other families learn to withhold access, and the organisation's ability to do its work narrows in ways that never show up in a log frame but reshape everything on the ground. Trust, once broken with a community, does not come back on the organisation's timeline. It comes back on the community's, if it comes back at all.
A sector being squeezed
And this is happening at exactly the moment when trust matters most. The CAF UK Giving Report published earlier this year found that total public donations fell from £15.4 billion to £14 billion in 2025, the first decline in total giving in five years. For international development specifically, the UK government is reducing its aid budget from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% by 2027/28, the lowest proportion of GNI since 1999.
The sector is being squeezed from multiple directions at once, and in that landscape, the organisations that will hold on to their supporters will not necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated campaigns. They are the ones whose supporters believe, in a way that goes deeper than any impact report, that their money is being used well and their trust is being honoured. That belief cannot be manufactured through communications. It is built over years of consistency between what an organisation promises and what it delivers, between how it presents itself to donors and how it actually treats the communities it claims to serve. And it can be destroyed by a single visible breach between what an organisation says and what it does.
What trust looks like when it compounds
I know this because I have watched trust compound and I have watched it collapse. The people who sent me two pounds for a child's school fees over a decade ago came back the next term, and some of them are still coming back now. The mentors who showed up for the first cohort of Young and Mentored brought other mentors with them. The supporters of Givers of Hope and Help Trust did not arrive through a donor acquisition pipeline but because someone they trusted told them I could be trusted too, and that chain — one person vouching for another — has proved more durable than any fundraising infrastructure I have seen.
But I have also watched what happens when that chain breaks. When an organisation says one thing publicly and does another privately, when staff see leadership making promises to funders that everyone inside the building knows cannot be kept, or when a community discovers that their story was used in ways they never agreed to, the damage is already happening. It does not arrive gradually. It arrives in the form of people deciding that this is no longer an organisation they are willing to back, to work for, or to open their lives to. By the time that withdrawal becomes visible in the numbers, the leaders are usually the last to understand what happened.
The distance between that answer and a better one is not a rebrand or a new strategy document or a set of values on the wall.
The questions I would put to any organisation are not simply "do people trust us?" but "what have we asked people to trust us with, have we earned that trust, and are we protecting it with the seriousness it deserves?" Because the answer, more often than most leaders want to admit, is no. And the distance between that answer and a better one is not a rebrand or a new strategy document or a set of values on the wall. It is a decision to treat trust as what it actually is: the load-bearing wall of everything you are trying to build, and the one thing you cannot afford to let crack. Especially now.