A challenge I’ve faced in my service year is…

Building trust. Trust is uniquely challenging in that the biggest obstacle to it tends to be in your own head. Working with someone you do not know is a lot like making friends for the first time, only now you have the potential for all the fears and social anxieties that came with going to middle school.

Does this person like me? Are they mean? Will we get along? What if I say the wrong thing?

Depending on your social inclinations, those thoughts could be enough to deter you from even trying. And while it is easy to reassure ourselves, “Oh, these relationships develop naturally!” and this is true to some extent, we also know that not everyone we work with is our friend and willing to help us however we ask, especially when our help can be outside their job description. And in City Year, that kind of situation often arises with AmeriCorps members and custodial staff in the schools we partner with.

In City Year, whether you are working in a school-based team for academic support, or working in Civic Engagement running service projects, you will definitely be working with custodians. They are the backbone any school’s facilities, and as a result, have access to the whole building and knows most of the school’s miscellaneous supplies. Yet often they are invisible to much of the school and its staff and are used to being asked to clean up rooms and accommodate large events without much thanks or forewarning. From my past service year, and my second one, I have met several custodians with a chip on their shoulder, noting how no one seems to let them know ahead of time when they need to stay late or realize the gravity of the tasks being given to them.

But I have a special, complex, secret, unique, patented, strategy I have developed for building relationships with the custodians in schools.

I ask them how they’re doing.

Pretty crazy, right? It’s a simple question of course, but a small question, when asked genuinely, can go a long way. This helps establish you care about someone as a person, and not as a robot that performs tasks on demand. Often it is such a rare situation for the custodians I have worked with, that they will go at great length to talk about what is going on in their life. In fact, on the latest service project I was working on, I asked one custodian named Caesar how his week was while he unlocked a storage room for me. He ended up telling me about how his wife worked in real estate, and that he was helping her on the side. He talked about how much he enjoyed working on real estate with his wife, and that he hoped to eventually make it is his full-time job. Later, he asked me how I enjoyed my service, and from then on we made small talk whenever I needed his support in the day.

Hollywood movies like to make trust about performing herculean tasks to our own detriment. And while there is a time and place for that, sometimes building trust is about making the small gestures that everyone else forgets.