Opinion: Restoring public trust in science doesn’t have a simple solution. That’s OK — SkimNews
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- Michelle Groman and Caroline Montojo, presidents of The Greenwall Foundation and Dana Foundation, argue in a STAT opinion piece that rebuilding public trust in science demands sustained community engagement rather than improved messaging.
- The Dana, Greenwall, Templeton, and Boston Foundations jointly funded STAT's new trust-in-science investigative beat to deepen public understanding of why trust is eroding and how to rebuild it.
- A 2024 Dana Foundation grant paired UCLA and Charles R. Drew University scientists with South Los Angeles residents in community listening sessions, where parents identified low-flying helicopter noise as a threat to children's sleep and brain health.
- Researchers recorded the local flight noise and replicated it in animal models, finding that persistent exposure impaired brain function; they then presented the findings to the Los Angeles city council during deliberations on expanding the helicopter fleet.
- The city council paused its expansion decision and requested additional research, which is now underway, marking a tangible policy outcome from the community-partnered project.
- A RAND Europe/Wellcome report mapped trustworthiness along five dimensions — expertise, benevolence, transparency, responsiveness, and integrity — across individual, institutional, and system levels, underscoring the problem's complexity.
- The UCLA-Charles R. Drew team has launched its next collaboration with South LA residents, studying how music affects brain health and resilience, extending the trust-building relationship beyond the helicopter study.
Why it matters: For foundations and university researchers, the UCLA-CDU South LA collaboration offers a concrete alternative to science-communication campaigns: pairing research with community listening produced a city council pause on helicopter fleet expansion and seeded an ongoing music-and-brain-health study. The project reframes trust-building as a bidirectional, long-term investment rather than a messaging problem — one that yielded civic action beyond academic publication.
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