The Humanity Trust Coin

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Humanity Trust Coin turns character into capital

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Trust Coins

There is a story they tell about the First World War.

An American airman is shot down behind German lines. He is captured, and his papers are taken from him. Somehow he escapes, and makes it west, across the mud, to the French positions.

The French do not know him. He has no documents, and he does not speak the language. They take him for a spy.

He is about to be executed.

The only thing on him is a small bronze medallion—a US military Challenge Coin— given to every man in his squadron. He shows it. Someone recognises the insignia.

They realise he is a friend, he can be trusted. His life is spared.

Historians will tell you the story cannot be verified, and they are right. But it has been told for a hundred years, and traditions survive that long only when they carry something true. In the moment that mattered, that coin was the difference between being a friend and being a stranger.

I only came to know that story less than a month ago.

My colleague Freddy Mutanguha, Director of the Kigali Genocide Memorial, had introduced me to Scott and his party of business executives. Afterwards Scott — a man I had barely met — came over, put a challenge coin from their trip into my hand, thanked me, and explained what it meant.

I was deeply touched, I thanked Scott, and I was intrigued.

Because what he had just described was something I have watched the absence of, in young people, for twenty years.

The room you cannot get into

Somewhere today, someone is deciding whether to take a chance on a young person they do not know.

An employer, looking at a first application. A lender, considering a small advance. A university, weighing a place.

Every one of them is doing the same thing: deciding whether to trust a stranger.

And because that is genuinely difficult, they reach for proxies. The school. The family name. The internship someone arranged. The reference from a person they already know.

None of those measure a young person's humanity. They measure their proximity to privilege.

So the young person with no proximity is not rejected. That is the part I want you to sit with.

They are never assessed at all.

They walk into that room with nothing that marks them out as a friend. No insignia. No one to vouch. And the decision is made without anyone ever finding out who they are.

The numbers nobody disputes

257 million young people worldwide — one in five — are not in employment, education or training. Half of those surveyed say they feel hopeless about their future.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control found that one in five high school students seriously considered suicide in a single year. Suicide among 10-to-24-year-olds has risen 62% since 2007.

And 16-to-24-year-olds now report loneliness more often than any older generation. More than the very old.

These are not the results of failing to teach children facts. We are rather good at teaching facts — we examine them, certify them, fund them and measure them.

They are what happens when hope, belonging and self-worth are left to look after themselves.

We call these qualities essential, and we treat them as incidental.

A question I could not answer

Here is the question that sent me down this road, and I would genuinely like to know what you make of it.

Every market on earth values things on their future potential.

A company is not priced on the cash in its accounts; it is priced on what it is expected to do next. Every valuation, everywhere, is a judgement about what is still to come.

Human beings are the ultimate source of that potential. Nothing gets built without us.

So why is human potential the one asset nobody prices?

The answer, I have come to think, is not that it lacks value. It is that there is no information.

Markets price a company's future because there are accounts, forecasts, a track record. For a young person outside the system there is nothing at all.

So they are not priced low.

They are priced at zero, and passed over.

What we forgot

I want to tell you about a place where this was solved once, three hundred years ago.

Before banks were buildings, a bank was a bench.

The word comes from the Italian banca — a table. When a banker failed, his bench was broken: banca rotta. Bankrupt.

In the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those tables were where modern credit began.

Lloyd's started in one. So did the stock exchange.

And here is the part that stopped me.

A loan across those tables rarely took two people.

It took three.

A lender, a borrower — and a guarantor. Someone already known and trusted, willing to put their own name behind the borrower's word. The lender could turn to the others at the table and ask what they knew of the man.

Creditworthiness was not calculated. It was attested.

The vocabulary gives it away.

Credit comes from credere — to believe, the same root as creed. A creditor is, quite literally, a person of faith: someone choosing to believe in your future before it arrives.

Finance did not invent this language. It took it from human relationship, and then drained the humanity out of it.

Young people have never had that third party at the table.

Nobody stands beside them and says: I know this person. I will vouch for them.

What we are building

It borrows from the airman's coin, from the coffee house guarantor, and from something the Quakers proved at national scale — that when you are excluded from everything else, trustworthiness itself becomes the asset.

Barred from the universities and the professions, Quakers made honesty central to who they were. And it became their competitive advantage. They founded the banks that people trusted with their money, which became the leading banks in the UK still today, Barclays and Lloyds.

The coin

We are calling it the Humanity Trust Coin.

It begins in the hands of someone with wealth. It ends in the hands of a young person who has earned it, giving them opportunity to match their talent — and creating new wealth in the process.

And wealth here does not only mean money, though money clearly matters. It also means experience, talent, connections and ideas.

One coin. One young person. A bond between two people who may never meet.

And in Rwanda, where I have spent twenty-two years, there is already a word for what it carries. Ubumuntu. Humanity — what it means to be human, and to act humanely towards others.

What I would like to ask you

I am not going to set out the whole mechanism here. It runs to rather more than a blog post, and I would rather test the thinking before I publish the architecture.

But I would like to know what you think about three things.

First: who vouched for you? Almost everyone I ask can name one person who backed them before they had earned it. I can. Her name was Marina, and I was nineteen.

Second: is there a a young person you know? Someone written off early, who you are fairly sure is worth a chance — and what has stopped you making the call?

Third: if you had a coin of your own to give — who would you give it to, and why?

We already have systems for measuring what a young person knows and can do.

What we lack is a trusted system for recognising who they are becoming — and allowing other people to put meaningful trust behind that judgement. That is what the Humanity Trust Coin is designed to achieve.

Passing it forward, calling it forward, and paying it forward.

More soon.

Yours humbly,

Glen Ford is the founder of Champions. He spent twenty-two years supporting Rwanda's reconciliation and rebuilding, including with the Aegis Trust at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.