How It Works

What We Do

We are creating educational materials that help people navigate the bad information that is flooding their communities. At Co-Designing for Trust we understand that you have to navigate a lot of information every day, and some of it is designed to deceive, to exploit your emotions, and to divide your communities. We are supporting communities to create tailored educational resources that they can use to better sort the good from the bad. Our approach ensures that these resources reflect your community’s needs and values, so that our educational solutions fit easily into your everyday lives.

Why This Work Is Important

We offer resources that help communities respond to false and misleading information, often referred to as misinformation. Misinformation is a big problem around the world, which impacts everything from jobs and health public services and general community wellbeing. Unfortunately, misinformation is a difficult problem to address, because it is often intentionally designed to trick us, exploit our emotions, and pit us against one another. And, it is only getting worse, with the new problems being introduced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

To make matters worse, very few educational programs have been created to address misinformation within many of the communities that are affected by it. This can make communities feel that the programs are disconnected from the everyday realities of how they interact with information.

Our team is working to reverse this trend, by collaborating directly with communities to create holistic solutions tailored to their unique local context. This site includes resources that we have co-designed with our community partners. We're making these resources available to you - please feel free to download them, edit them, and use them. And, if you have great resources of your own, please share them back with us. Our goal is to create a community of librarians and educators working together to produce the resources that their communities need.

Our Co-Design Approach

Strengthening trust requires that we all work together to overcome the many divides created by misinformation. We believe that everyone needs to have a seat at the table when we are creating solutions, which is why we have adopted a co-design approach. Co-design is a process that involves communities in the design of their own solutions. This ensures that the educational resources that we produce are relevant and steeped in the wisdom of your community. We design for trust with you: Educators, librarians, community leaders, learners, activists, and anyone else who is looking to be a part of the solution.

What is the Co-Design Approach?

Co-design—short for collaborative design—is a way of creating solutions with people, not just for them. Rooted in the tradition of participatory design, which emerged in the 1970s to give workers a voice in shaping the tools they used, co-design continues this legacy by centering collaboration, equity, and shared ownership in the design process.

When used with librarians and educators, co-design helps surface the real-world challenges they face in teaching information literacy—and leads to more practical, culturally relevant resources that resonate with their students, patrons, and communities.

Why Co-Design Matters

Too often, educational tools or programs are created without the input of the teachers, librarians, and communities who will actually use them. Co-design flips that model on its head. It values local knowledge and sees everyone involved as a designer—regardless of job title.

When we co-design:

Educators bring their classroom realities.
Librarians share what their communities need.
Students voice their learning experiences.

Together, we create resources that are more relevant, usable, and empowering.

What Does Co-Design Look Like?

Co-design can take many forms, including:

Workshops where participants sketch or brainstorm ideas together
Interviews and story-sharing sessions that guide design decisions
Feedback loops that shape drafts and prototypes

Ongoing partnerships where communities are part of every step