In 1990, an Egyptian Air Force commander told me he’d learned everything he needed to know about America at a baseball game. There, he saw a vendor going up and down the stadium steps selling hot dogs. A fan in the middle of a row called out his order and handed a $5 bill to strangers seated beside him; fellow fans formed a spontaneous bucket brigade to pass the bill to the vendor. “And no one pocketed the fiver!” The general was similarly impressed when those same strangers passed the hot dog back to the fan. “And no one took a bite! You can build all the bombers and missiles you like,” he said, “but nothing will keep your country strong like the trust you have in the system you built and the trust you have in each other.”

He was right. Trust is the societal glue on which our democracy depends. Yet today, 30 years later, trust is at an all-time low. And in poll after poll, Americans question whether the system we built works—or at least works for them. Sociologists and political scientists tell us that the current trust deficit corresponds with a decades-long decline in social connectedness and the social capital Americans build. They point to a pervasive sense of precarity and fear of lost identity as well as a loss of governing capacity during a period of unrelenting change.

Indeed, society has been buffeted by three unstoppable trends: the information revolution, economic globalization, and demographic change. Together they drive rapid—and for many, unwelcome—change. The information revolution decentralized decision-making and authority and gave rise to social media that drives untruths designed to divide. Globalization redistributed production and concentrated wealth, contributing to the shrinking of the American middle class. At the same time, demographic change prompted fears about the loss of majority status and the privilege—including political power and economic advantage—it confers.

These changes have created and exacerbated pressing social problems that no one sector can fully manage on its own: emerging infectious diseases, climate change, ever-widening disparities in income and assets, and searing divisions forming along educational, cultural, and partisan lines. Racial bias, having insinuated itself into choices made along the way—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes brazenly, and always unjustly—has been revealed in ways that cannot, must not be ignored.

And because our system has neither managed the changes nor addressed their consequences, it is not unreasonable for some to conclude that our system, no matter how elegantly described, is not up to the governance challenges posed. It has led to a decline of confidence and trust in our institutions.

But as daunting as these challenges are, the United States has a singular asset on which to draw, a unique form of self-governance in which the public, private, and social sectors each have a role to play. We experience it on the community level daily and acknowledge it occasionally and fitfully when the problem faced requires that systems be changed. It is time we lean into that asset.  When the three sectors collaborate, each bringing its core competencies to the excercise, solutions are often found at the intersection of the three. I call that the “intersector,” a term coined by investor and philanthropist Frank Weil.

Read the full article about rebuilding trust in society by Jane Wales at Stanford Social Innovation Review.