Building Trust in Community Colleges: A Journey from Top to Bottom (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: My training in my prior life would be to go to the top of any organization or school and build a relationship with the president, the board, and I thought from there, gee, the waters would pardon, we'd be off and running. Issues that we did not anticipate started with trust and relationships. We didn't have the relationships with community-based organizations or others. There are racial implications for what we're doing, so we would walk into neighborhoods that we did not come from and there'd be an immediate, who are you and why are you here? So there are built-in biases that we did not really anticipate. Our first pilot site is a community college in the central coast, coastal area of California. It's called Santa Maria, California, so it's migrant farm country, largely Hispanic. So we found a community college called Alan Hancock Community College, where we built a trusted relationship with some of the administrators and the president of the college. That took about a year, so once they realized that we were not toxic, we were not radioactive, that indeed we had something to offer to the students, that's when they allowed us access to their students, and from there it became a relationship with the students, which certainly took some time. So we've had to build trusted relationships at the top and the bottom, and it doesn't necessarily go from top to bottom, it could go from bottom to top, which is a very new experience for us.