Trust: The True Currency of Social Impact
Moving Beyond The PR Sheild to Genuine Institutional Resilience
Trust, much like artisanal craft, is built with intentionality, consistency, and a focus on long-term stewardship.
In my previous role in civic engagement, I spent years obsessing over how Parliaments designed the "visible" contract—the clauses, liabilities, and formal structures that theoretically govern how society functions. I believed that if we could just get the language right, draft the perfect policy, and nail down the regulatory framework, we could engineer social progress.
As I advanced into international development, earned my Executive MBA, and then began working in responsible business advisory, I experienced a significant shift in my perspective: impactful initiatives are not just about documents; they hinge on an invisible element—Trust. I’ve seen this reality across sectors, regions, and operational levels.
In the advisory world, we've been conditioned to view trust as a "soft" metric, a sentiment we aim to cultivate, a vague reputational benefit that's difficult to quantify. But what I've learned from working with organisations ranging from multinationals to grassroots NGOs is that trust is a powerful and tangible economic asset.
The OECD has extensively documented this in its social cohesion frameworks: trust is a key factor in economic growth. The process is simple and quantifiable. When trust is high, transaction costs drop significantly. You spend much less on monitoring, verification, legal enforcement, and damage control. Those resources can be redirected to implementation, innovation, and scaling.
In our work at The Muyi Group, I've seen this dynamic play out in real-time across diverse contexts:
An agribusiness in East Africa seeking to green its supply chain found that the technical sustainability framework was the easy part. The hard part? Earning the trust of smallholder farmers who'd been burned by previous "partnership" initiatives that extracted more value than they delivered.
A philanthropy deploying capital across 6 countries learned that no amount of due diligence could replace the social license earned through consistent, transparent engagement with community leaders who understood the local context far better than any external consultant.
In both cases, the "social license to operate" was never obtained solely through contracts or capital. It was earned through relationships, demonstrated through consistency, and maintained through transparency.
When Impact Becomes a PR Shield
The Edelman Trust Barometer has consistently revealed a striking contradiction: business is now regarded as the most capable institution for addressing global challenges—more so than government, NGOs, or the media. Companies are perceived as effective, innovative, and able to mobilise resources at scale. But even within this opportunity, the uncomfortable truth is that competence without ethics fosters suspicion rather than collaboration.
If a company claims "social impact" but lacks genuine trust with its local stakeholders, the community quickly recognises what's happening. That impact isn't seen as a contribution — it's viewed as a PR shield, a technical tactic to manage reputation while continuing business as usual.
I've sat in boardrooms where executives genuinely believed their CSR initiatives were making a difference, completely unaware that community members viewed those same programs with deep cynicism. The gap wasn't in the program design. It was in the relationship architecture.
This is where my transition from "Civic Policy" to "Responsible Business" evolved from a career pivot into a fundamental shift in my approach to systemic change.
In my work, I no longer just ask: What is the policy?
I now ask: How is the relationship built?
Because the best-designed policy in the world will fail without trust. And a mediocre policy supported by genuine partnership will often outperform it.
As I build out my new professional home here, my goal is to help businesses move beyond the performative. Too many organisations treat social impact as something you add on at the end—a report you publish once a year to satisfy stakeholders, a glossy narrative that resides on the sustainability page of your website but doesn't influence your core business model.
We're moving toward something fundamentally different: a model in which social impact isn't an afterthought or an accessory but the result of a trust-based strategy that begins on day one.
This means:
Embedding stakeholder engagement in strategic planning, not just communications
Designing business models where value creation and social impact are indivisible
Building feedback loops that allow communities to shape your approach, not just receive it
This invisible contract is the only one that genuinely scales. Legal agreements ensure compliance. Trust leads to transformation.
In today's global landscape, transparency is often viewed as a technical burden—a series of checkboxes to satisfy international mandates, a compliance exercise managed by the legal or sustainability department.
“When we adopt a stewardship perspective, disclosure isn’t a burden. It’s the grounding architecture of trust.”
The most resilient organisations I work with don't just "report" data. They embody it.
What's the difference?
Reporting organisations say: "Here's what we did last year to meet ESG requirements."
Embodying organisations say: "Here's how our values show up in every decision we make, and here's the data that proves it."
By aligning IFRS Sustainability Reporting standards with local operational realities, the organisations I partner with turn what could be a compliance obligation into a strategic advantage. This isn't just about "private-sector efficiency"—though efficiency certainly improves. It's about crafting a narrative that resonates with the organisation's core values and stakeholder expectations.
The Economic Case: Why the Market Rewards Embodied Values
Here's the truth that's increasingly validated by financial markets: institutional trust is not built overnight, but when it is built, the market responds—not just with capital, but with partnership.
When investors, customers, employees, and communities believe that your business genuinely embodies its stated values:
Cost of capital decreases (investors view you as lower-risk)
Customer loyalty increases (people pay more for brands they trust)
Top talent is attracted and retained (purpose-driven professionals seek you out)
Regulatory friction reduces (governments grant you more operational flexibility)
Community resistance evaporates (your social license is secure)
This is the hard economics of trust as a strategic asset.
The Invitation: Architecting Your Trust-Based Strategy
If you're reading this and recognising that your organisation is stuck in performative impact—spending resources on narratives that don't match reality, publishing reports that no one believes, managing stakeholders rather than partnering with them—there's a different path forward.
It starts with an honest audit:
Where have we sacrificed relationships for efficiency?
Where have we prioritised optics over genuine engagement?
Where are we treating trust as a sentiment rather than an asset?
It requires a commitment: to treat business as an embodiment of values, not merely a vehicle for profit with values painted on the side.
The organisations I'm privileged to work with aren't perfect. But they're committed to the journey. And that commitment—that willingness to be transparent about both progress and shortcomings—is where trust begins. And when it's lived consistently, it becomes the most valuable asset your organisation will ever build.
To discuss how to architect your own trust-based sustainability narrative and move beyond performative impact, [Initiate a Dialogue →]
