Trusted Space Partners
Designing Pivotal Moments for Community Change

Trusted Space Partners is a team of experienced community developers and designers who are supporting collaborative community change initiatives all over the United States. These initiatives are firmly grounded in the wisdom of people who live and work together in local communities. 

​The Partners, Frankie Blackburn and Bill Traynor, are long time practitioners who have worked at the grass roots level in community for a combined 60 years.  Both Bill and Frankie have direct experience as organizers, developers, social designers and Executive Directors of powerful local organizations focused on building new networks of residents and institutions that cross traditional boundaries. 
 
Today, more than ever, new strategies are needed for helping people and institutions work together locally to maximize opportunities and make change.  Trusted Space is an innovative approach that believes that our biggest need and challenge is to shape new community moments that level power dynamics and invite a wider group of people to shape and share relationships of value and design and drive change.  

Trusted Space focuses on four strategies for change-making at the local level:

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Network Organizing

We help diverse teams of local community members build a powerful network of change makers who cross traditional boundaries and who practice new habits of engagement, mutual support, innovation, problem solving and mobilization. 

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Institutional
Co-Investment

We help staff teams of critical institutions like schools, foundations, social service organizations, hospitals, universities and private sector organizations make shifts in their operating culture and practices to build more impactful relationships with clients or participants and achieve genuine demand-driven change. 

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Housing Communities

In partnership with the National Initiative on Mixed Income Communities (NIMC) at Case Western Reserve University, we help housing providers and residents work together towards a Triple Aim Impact in the daily operation of communities serving a wide range of people, including those with very low incomes.  We introduce concrete practices for achieving: (1) Operating Efficiency (2) Community Transformation and (3)  Resident Transformation.

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Quality of Life
Marketplaces

We help neighbors, working alone or in small groups, to use a set of intentional spaces and practices to build connections with others and increase their quality of life today, outside the framework of large networks or formal institutions. We call this the “Q Way”, and is based on the premise that we can achieve a higher quality of life by sharing our abundant skills, talents, wisdom and stuff through simple neighbor to neighbor exchanges. 

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