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This article studies the involvement of Western diaspora communities of Transylvanian Saxons in the humanitarian campaign for Romania during the flood disaster in 1970. It shows how the Saxons’ private relief campaigns established new forms of connectivity and exchange across the Iron Curtain through a transnational regime of care, ethnic solidarity, and charitable work. The article argues that the contingent and precarious situation of such spatially divided ethnic communities refashioned a generation of World War II refugees and migrants from “speechless” objects of humanitarian intervention into passionate advocates, effective mediators, and surprising champions of private aid giving in postwar Europe.

This article unearths the little-known history of charitable giving in Cold War Europe. The first case explores supply conduits forged in the German Romanian community of West Germany and Romania. Starting in the late 1960s, Western community members became involved in supporting those left behind in Romania through care packages and tourist visits. As the political leadership under Nicolae Ceaușescu adopted drastic austerity measures in the early 1980s, the second case shows how East German volunteer groups organized aid to Romania from within the socialist bloc. The discussion concludes that the provisioning relationships uncovered in both examples integrated the world of materials into daily aspirations of ‘governing precarious lives’ to a new repertoire for public action that did not remain external to politics but rather reformulated what was at stake in politics through immediate, direct acts of assistance.

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This article grapples with a critical question in public humanities work: How should academics think of trust as a theoretical problem in current public health, policy, and academic debates but also as a practice of engagement with local communities and collaborators outside the academy? We recount our experience of the TrustWorkers project at Columbia University in 2022—a project focused on the critical role of Community Health Workers as trust builders during the pandemic—to illustrate our thinking on this matter and contribute new impulses to publicly engaged scholarship.