Trust Is Infrastructure

Domenico Ruggerio is one of nine rising community leaders who took part in Aspen Digital’s Community & Tech Leaders Initiative. Over the course of a year, the cohort. deepened their understanding of emerging technologies and explored how community perspectives could shape the innovation ecosystem. This blogpost and accompanying resource was produced at the conclusion of the Initiative. 

Trust is often talked about as something we build through relationships. That is true, and relationships matter deeply. But in my work with LGBTQ+ young people across South Carolina, I have learned that trust also depends on something less visible: whether the systems around people actually follow through.

For many LGBTQ+ youth in the South, trust is not an abstract idea. It can sound like very practical questions: Will this adult do what they said they would do? Will this referral actually lead somewhere? Will this organization protect me, or will it expose me to more harm? These questions matter especially for young people who are Black, Brown, rural, low-income, trans, and gender-expansive, and who often navigate schools, healthcare systems, families, and public institutions that were not built with their safety or dignity in mind.

Too often, trust breaks not because people do not care, but because the infrastructure underneath care is fragmented. A young person may finally ask for therapy, but the next step is unclear. A retreat may create belonging and joy, but there may be no follow-up afterward. A young person may be invited to share feedback, but never see how their voice shaped the decision. Over time, these small breaks teach people whether a system can be relied on.

Technology now shapes these moments of trust in powerful ways. A young person’s path to support may move through a group chat, an intake form, a telehealth platform, a referral spreadsheet, a case note, a school monitoring system, or a social media algorithm before it ever becomes a conversation with another person. Each of those digital touchpoints can either make care feel more reliable or make support feel more confusing, risky, or unreachable. That is why technology cannot be treated as separate from community care.

The resource I created, Trust Infrastructure for the Digital Age: Lessons from LGBTQ+ Youth Organizing in the South, offers a practical way to understand where trust is built, where it breaks, and how it can be redesigned. It introduces five layers of trust infrastructure: peer trust, relational trust, pathway trust, institutional trust, and ecosystem trust. These layers help us see that trust is not only about whether someone feels welcomed in one moment. It is also about whether they can move through a system and experience care, follow-up, protection, and accountability at every step.

One of the central ideas in the primer is the “digital handoff.” A handoff is any moment when responsibility, information, care, or power moves from one person, system, or organization to another. In the digital age, many of those handoffs now happen through technology. The question is not only, “Does the tool work?” The deeper question is, “Does the person using it feel held by the system behind it?”

The framework is grounded in SC BLOOM, a statewide collaboration led by We Are Family with the Harriet Hancock Center and Uplift Outreach Center. Together, we support LGBTQ+ youth across the Lowcountry, Midlands, and Upstate regions of South Carolina through peer support, retreats, wellness education, leadership development, mental health pathways, and linkages to affirming care. SC BLOOM began with HIV prevention education through a statewide virtual support group, but it expanded as young people told us what they needed. They were not only asking for information. They were asking for connection, care, leadership, and systems that did not disappear after one program ended.

In its pilot year, SC BLOOM reached more than 2,000 unduplicated LGBTQ+ young people through more than 8,000 service interactions across South Carolina. But the deeper story is not only the number of young people reached. The deeper story is what had to be built underneath that reach: trusted regional anchors, warm referrals, youth leadership, partner coordination, virtual and in-person connection, shared governance, and repeated follow-through. That is what makes SC BLOOM more than a set of programs. It is an emerging piece of trust infrastructure.

My hope is that this primer gives community organizations, funders, policymakers, and technology leaders a clearer way to ask better questions. Where does trust break after someone says yes? Who owns the follow-up? How is information protected? Does this tool make care more reliable, or does it create another broken pathway? Most importantly, who has the power to shape the systems they are being asked to trust?

Trust infrastructure is built in places people often overlook. It is built in the handoff, the follow-up, the referral, the feedback loop, the data practice, the moderation policy, the meeting rhythm, and the moment someone asks, “Can I rely on this?” If we want communities to trust the systems being built around them, we have to design those systems with them. Trust is not a soft outcome. It is infrastructure.

The views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Aspen Institute, its programs, staff, volunteers, participants, or its trustees.