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Face to Face Trust

Charity Number 1125105

What is the Face to Face Trust?


The Face to Face Trust is a new and unique national charity, with a personally empowering and essentially preventative focus, founded in 2008. The Trust seeks to promote and enhance personal and social trust, without which no society or individual can function with confidence and efficiency. Hence the Trust seeks to deliver awareness and growth in absolutely basic issues, making a real difference to life quality for citizens, and at low unit cost.


Trustees are especially concerned with changing the nature of many dysfunctional personal relationships within our fragmented society: at home in family life, in business, employment, public services, relevant political arenas, and within local communities. At the centre of most down-stream socio-economic and educational problems are issues of lack of trust between people; and trust is clearly a very precious and delicate human capacity.


Despite many material improvements, our variously stressed times emotionally, economically and practically, reflect deep desperations for personal significance, meaning, trust, and sufficient social predictability, reliable love and belonging. Frustrated by a seeming lack of cohesive, non-partisan concern for these personal and social fundamentals, a diverse range of experience, energy and concerns of individual Foundation Trustees came together in the Spring of 2008 to establish the Trust; and that very word is for us an active noun.

 

The nurture of trust is the mission of this Trust


We humans are neither born with trust, nor with its derivatives of compassion and loving kindness. We arrive in this world only with those innate longings. Hence those crucial human qualities are learned capacities, or ‘capabilities’. They are acquired by sufficient real experience, and so are handed on, or not, within the varied social contexts and stages of a person’s life.


Because the capacity to trust, through varieties of relationship, is one that is acquired, and so learned, through experience, it is capable of being seriously influenced by appropriately sensitive educational action. Fundamentally this is the mission of the Face to Face Trust, a registered charity, grown in part from the embers of other charitable endeavours, in response to the massive and ongoing neglect of this basic arena within almost all conventional educational provisions.


Sadly when any of us messes up our relationships or sense distrust in whatever context, only rarely are these features our ‘fault’. Our cultural priorities simply do not value relational competence, confidence and sensitivity by baseline investments that are even more fundamental to social and personal well-being than are reading, writing and arithmetic.  Indeed the Trust views relational literacy and competence as the very first, the prime ‘R’, grown from infancy, and nurtured, or not, at every life-stage.


In addressing such neglected fundamentals, the Trust brings to its mission sober social assessments and cultural sensitivity. Not least, the Trust also brings a wide range of marginalised yet thorough and timely educational experience, including materials, techniques and practices for adaptation to diverse contexts. These will be mediated by a variety of Professional Associates who are to be affiliated within our planned network for research-informed practical action. The Trust aims to be a lean and highly efficient charity, using a variety of means of influence.

 

Social context concerns


Many factors have prompted social distrust reaching close to an unsustainable pandemic. The near-collapse of banking systems in mid 2008 marked a new arena of fear, unknown for at least two generations. Distrust of socially-related environments begins for far too many in early childhood, though lack of quality time and skills for secure regular nurture by parents.


Amongst the uncomfortable educational and social realities, placing personal and community well-being at risk are:

Intergenerational cycles of emotional and social deprivation that cross all income groups are persistent. On the clear balance of evidence, the Trustees’ view is that such features can only be broken by serious educational intervention and user-friendly support, seen as necessary investment in basic social capital. Furthermore, in the foreseeable future, schools, colleges and universities are sadly highly unlikely to be in a position to initiate catalytic leadership in this structurally neglected sphere. So while the Trust hopes to work closely with concerned personnel within such institutions, and also businesses, its catalytic role is essential, over at least the next decade.

 

Declining emotional safety


For adults, the relentless pace of work and self-survival, often driven by debt, nowadays means that relationships are both difficult to build and to maintain. Low morale pervades the public services. In schools, it is for example widely observed by teachers that there is little time for them to stand back and reflect upon what they are doing; meetings rarely go beyond exchanging essential information about children, resources, plans and events. In a majority of working environments, people have become excessively target-driven, often disinclined to smile or reflect joy, ready to be short and impatient with each other.
There is a clear perception of declining emotional safety and decreasing opportunities to discuss feelings, rarely a strong card for men. Yet, no matter what their level of workplace or community responsibility, gender, or length of service, people are naturally hungry to know each other better.
In short, we are ever social beings who need each other, both to establish and sustain a meaningful social identity over the life course. Though the failure ofinfants to establish trust is often a lifelong wound, lack of familiarity, and of real relational exchange, breeds insecurity and lack of inner confidence at any stage of life. It takes someone to befriend to create a confident friend.


Low prospects for necessary educational reforms of substance


Educationally, a radical review of the knowledge and skills of most worth that sustain a society, and the lives of individuals within it, is decades overdue. Modern society has so far failed to explicitly address two fundamental questions:
a) How shall we get a life?
b) How shall we live together?
These questions are not significant drivers of the national curriculum, or within systems of higher education. Almost exclusively, the public square sanctions studies of almost everything, except for the deep structures and many-pronged growth of the human person towards an optimum life-course development and responsibly participant citizenship. Relevant units of study only become available to a tiny minority of adult specialists entering psychiatric-related professions. Any of the and systems, a sad conclusion reached after at least 40 years of mounting evidence necessary rebalancing of the content of public educational endeavours is presently highly unlikely to take place without charitable trailblazing of good practice outside current structures and spasmodic advocacy.