Today, the Monitor begins its next big project, Rebuilding Trust. You won’t see balloons and confetti. The idea isn’t to start with a bang. Rather, our goal for the coming months is to provide stories each week that focus on the crucial role of trust in the world today. 

You don’t need to go far to hear about a trust crisis. Trust in our institutions is falling. So is trust in our political opponents. Trust that we can save the planet. Today, Erika Page kicks us off with a look at trust in cryptocurrency.

But trust is the lubricant of world progress. How can we rebuild trust? What emerges is the importance of trustworthiness. To build trust, one must be worthy of trust. Trust is the compass needle that points us toward where we can do better. 

Rebuilding Trust will build on our previous values projects, such as The Respect Project and Finding Resilience, as well as our more recent values approach to a wide variety of our stories. News, after all, is not just about a fight over policies. It’s also about the clashing of values we hold dear. Realizing that gives us greater understanding and agency.

The goal is to do what our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, told us to do: “Bless all mankind.” We know the role media plays in how we see the world. By looking at trust in the months ahead, we hope not only to provide more clarity on the issues that really matter, but to give you a more constructive and credibly hopeful way of seeing them.   

You can find the project at www.CSMonitor.com/trust. We hope you’ll come back in the coming weeks as the project gains momentum.