Finding Your Place on a Bigger Stage: What Community Leadership Taught Me About Building Trust

Lights up.

For years now, a real chunk of my calendar has gone to rooms that have nothing to do with marketing on paper. I sit on the board of the North Shore Schools Foundation. I hold a board of trustees seat at Evergreen Health Foundation. I served on the executive board of the Kenmore Business Alliance. I've stood at the podium for Woodinville Wine Country, the Bothell-Kenmore Chamber, and the Mercer Island Chamber of Commerce. I didn't say yes to any of it as a marketing strategy. But looking back at what it's built, it might be the smartest one I've ever run.

Here's what nobody tells you when you're deciding whether you have time for one more board seat: you're not just giving back. You're stepping into the room where trust actually gets built.

You don't get cast without an audition.

Nobody hands you a seat at a board table on a whim. Somebody watched how you work first. Somebody decided you were credible enough, steady enough, capable enough to represent something bigger than your own name. That's not a small thing to hand a stranger. It's a verdict, quietly reached, by people who had nothing to gain from being wrong about you.

And here's the part I didn't expect: that verdict travels. The room doesn't just see a board member. They see someone their community already vouched for. You can't write your way into that kind of trust. You have to be cast into it.

The scene can't be faked.

We're in a strange moment for trust. According to 2026 research from Klaviyo and Datalily, surveying more than 8,000 consumers, people who spot AI-generated content in a brand's marketing become four times more likely to trust that brand less, not more — 31 percent said their trust dropped, against just 7 percent who said it grew. Audiences are learning to read for what's real, the same way an audience learns to read for a performance that isn't.

Nobody can generate me sitting across the table at an Evergreen Health Foundation meeting, working through a hard decision with people who are counting on me to have done my homework. Nobody can automate a Thursday morning at a Bothell-Kenmore Chamber breakfast. That's the whole point. Community leadership puts an unscripted, unfiltered version of you in the room — and lately, unscripted is the rarest thing on the stage.

You don't get the callback from the seats. You get it from the stage.

Every board meeting, every panel, every chamber mixer is a room full of the exact people who will refer you, quote you, hire you, or walk you over to someone who will. I've watched this compound in real time — a conversation at one event turning into an introduction at the next, a passing comment at a board meeting turning into a referral six months later. None of it happened in a comment section. It happened because I was standing where the people were standing.

And every scene gives you something to write about later.

This might be the part I value most now. Every one of these rooms hands me material I couldn't invent at my desk — a real conversation, a real problem a nonprofit is working through, a real reaction from a real audience. That's the raw material of narrative marketing. Not a content prompt. A lived scene. While everyone else is trying to make their AI-assisted content sound more human, the founders showing up in their communities are collecting true stories in real time, faster than anyone could manufacture them.

Trust is a seat at the table, earned in front of the people who were already in the room.

If you're building a personal brand right now, look at your calendar before you look at your content calendar. What board, chamber, or committee in your own community could use what you know? Say yes to one. Show up like it matters, because it does. The visibility follows — and it's the kind no algorithm can hand you, and none can take away.

If you are looking to work on your leadership skills - I invite you to learn more about a collaboration I am hosting with my dear friend Jen Dean, of The A & E Collective - we are calling it The Founder's Rising Academy.