Building Trust, One Conversation at a Time

In 2020, my friend and colleague Dr. Terrence Robinson died suddenly and unexpectedly of COVID. For five years, we had built a youth apprenticeship program together in Cleveland, raised more than half a million dollars, and trained more than 200 young people. Terrence was Black. I am Jewish. The whole time, I wanted to talk with him about the things that sat quietly underneath our friendship: race, religion, history, privilege. I never did, because I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and the negative ramifications of saying something ignorant in the workplace. Then he was gone, and the conversation I kept postponing was gone with him.

I think about that silence often, because it is the same silence I now see between two communities that once helped change this country together.

Black and Jewish Americans marched, organized, and bled for civil rights side by side. That partnership was not sentimental. It was strategic, and it worked. Somewhere along the way it went cold. Today antisemitism and anti-Black racism are both climbing, and the alliance that once confronted them together has thinned to a memory. Two communities that are far stronger together keep facing hate alone.

We tend to treat this kind of fracture like a weather event. We wait for the storm, then we respond. A hate crime, a viral video, a campus blowing up, and suddenly there are statements, task forces, and emergency convenings. Institutions rush in after trust has already collapsed and ask people who barely know each other to solve a crisis together. It rarely works, because you cannot build a relationship in the middle of an emergency. You can only spend the trust you already have.

Here is the idea I want to put on the table. Relationships are civic infrastructure. They are as real as roads and as load-bearing as any institution, and like all infrastructure, they have to be built before you need them.

That is the whole premise of Rekindle, the organization I co-founded in Cleveland in 2021 alongside my co-founder Charmaine Rice. Our model is not complicated. We bring Black and Jewish adults together for 15 hours of honest, structured dialogue across five sessions. We create a space where people can ask the questions that are on their minds and hearts, so they don’t fall victim to that same silence and fear that I did. During the three-hour Rekindle workshops, we put power, privilege, race, religion, Israel, and shared history on the table and let people wrestle with them in the same room. Between sessions, Fellows host one another in their homes, their synagogues, and their churches. We take people from complete strangers who would never meet to lifelong friends and, hopefully, long-term collaborators towards building a more just and equitable society.

The obvious objection is that this is nice, but dialogue programs rarely have a serious impact. As a lifelong fundraiser, I know the importance of tangible metrics, so we built proof in from the first cohort. We survey every Fellow before, immediately after, and six months later, and this year we contracted with SSRS, a leading independent research firm, to test our results against someone other than us.

The findings are hard to argue with. Before Rekindle, 31 percent of Fellows saw themselves as bridge-builders between the Black and Jewish communities. Afterward, 71 percent did (+38 to 40 percent for both communities). The share who felt equipped to have difficult conversations about race rose from 63 percent to 89 percent. And 74 percent developed at least one deep, meaningful relationship with someone they would never otherwise have met. This is not a warm feeling that fades by Monday. Since their cohorts ended, 56 percent of Fellows have publicly advocated for the other community, and nearly all have taken at least one concrete action together.

In other words, you can manufacture trust on purpose, at scale, and it holds. That should be one of the most useful facts in American civic life right now.

The relationships also travel. What started as one cohort of friends around a table in Cleveland is now 20 cities and more than 475 alumni, all on a budget of roughly $450,000. People are hungry to get out from behind their screens and into a real, meaningful conversation. With 12 cities running Fall Rekindle cohorts, we hope that over 150 of our fellow Americans will create new relationships that they never knew were possible.

So this is my argument to anyone who cares about repairing democracy. Stop treating relationship-building as the soft, optional part of civic work. It is the foundation everything else stands on. Fund it before the crisis, not after. Get our communities to stop working in parallel, and start working in partnership. We’ve seen that by building trust when things are calm, we can weather the storm when things get tense. A city where Black and Jewish leaders already know each other, already trust each other, and have already practiced the hard conversations is a city that can absorb a shock without coming apart. That is what infrastructure does. It holds under load.

I never got to have that conversation I wanted to have with Terrence. But I have watched hundreds of people have theirs, and I have watched what those conversations build. We’re just getting started with repairing our broken country, one interfaith relationship at a time.

Matt Fieldman is the co-founder and executive director of Rekindle, a national nonprofit that rebuilds the historic partnership between Black and Jewish Americans through sustained, structured dialogue. Founded in Cleveland in 2021, Rekindle operates in 20 cities and has graduated more than 475 alumni Fellows. He lives in Cleveland with his wife Alyson, their three kids, and their rescued mutt, Mojo.