Understanding Public Trust: Our Latest Community Engagement Project

Over the last year, we’ve engaged over 1,200 Bahamians on 10 islands in discussions around active citizenship. This explored the concept of being a member of a Bahamian community; asked citizens their take on their role in community building; and began to build pathways to community-centric development. We are now conducting a new series of cross-island community focus groups.

With the generous support of the Templeton Religion Trust, we’ve begun an exploration of building public trust in communities through a series of 12 focus groups across 5 islands and 2 digital surveys to better understand the issue. We’ve already visited Andros, Eleuthera, and Grand Bahama and are working on New Providence and Cat Island in the coming weeks.

While being inspired by the voices of our people, we learned about the many barriers to civic participation. One of the leading factors that kept citizens from becoming engaged was public trust. Citizens were less willing to become engaged where there was no trust between citizens and their neighbors; or citizens and institutions in their communities, including government, private sector, and NGOs.

Our hope is that we ask simple questions as to what factors influence trust. We will use the data to help ourselves, the government, the private sector, other NGOs and citizens, to participate in more activities that will build trust, and ultimately participation.

To learn more, email citizens@orgbahamas.com