About Richard Roman
Trust Architect. Researcher. Practitioner.
Richard Roman, Ph.D./MPP candidate, is the founder and principal of Trusted Arc Labs. He helps organizations and civic institutions alike understand how trust functions as infrastructure and what to do when that infrastructure is broken.
His work sits at the intersection of organizational development and civic engagement strategy, bringing research rigor to the trust challenges that most practitioners treat as soft, unmeasurable, or inevitable. The trust framework Richard has developed enables leaders to systematically map, diagnose, and repair trust systems across four nested levels: individual, community, organizational, and civic.
Credentials
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Ph.D., Organizational Leadership and Policy Development - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (in progress)
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Master of Public Policy (MPP) - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (in progress)
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Master of Education (M.Ed.) - The George Washington University
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Bachelor of Arts (BA) - Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB)
Values
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Integrity: Do the right thing. even when no one is watching. Speak the truth with clarity and compassion.
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Inquiry: Ask better questions. Stay curious. Reject any false certainty.
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Responsibility: Take ownership of your impact. Create structures that make accountability possible.
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Equity: Build systems that recognize, include, and uplift people who have been historically excluded.
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Purpose: Lead with intention. Work should add meaning and momentum to people's lives.
Background
Richard grew up in southern Virginia - in a small town where questions of belonging and institutional power weren't abstract. They were personal. That early experience shaped everything that followed: a career built around understanding how trust is earned, how it erodes, and what it takes to rebuild it.
He earned his undergraduate degree at Indiana University, a master's in higher education administration at The George Washington University, and a doctorate in Organizational Leadership and Policy Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Along the way, he held senior roles at two of the most influential organizations in American higher education: the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the American Council on Education (ACE). His work in higher education focused on learning evaluations, institutional accountability, and crisis-responsive program design.
Richard's experience with trust isn't purely academic. He's navigated the complexities of coming out as a gay man in a conservative Southern community, managed strained family dynamics shaped by conditional affection, and worked through the burnout that comes from performing credibility rather than building it from the inside out. Those experiences are what give his work its depth and its edge.
The Inflection Point
After years of leading high-stakes initiatives and earning praise, Richard found himself asking a harder question: What does it mean to build trust with institutions when you haven't built it with yourself?
That question reshaped everything. Richard launched Trust Be Told - an early attempt at a podcast and newsletter to explore how leaders build trust within their areas of expertise. That early pilot became Fault Lines, an ongoing project that examines the fragile architecture of trust across education, leadership, identity, and public life. He also created a proprietary trust framework to give practitioners a systematic approach to the challenges he'd spent his career studying. He built Trusted Arc Labs to put that framework into practice.