A Few Thoughts on Community Connection Initiatives
It’s an exciting time for building connected communities
By Michael Kirsch
In recent years, the U.S. Surgeon General's advisory and a World Health Organization global commission report have identified social connection as essential to our mental and physical health — on par with diet and exercise — and named it an urgent public health priority. They also found that social connection is essential for building connected communities where trust, belonging, and economic opportunities are abundant.
Social connection is the structure, function, and quality of our relationships with others. To be healthy, research has found that people need meaningful and satisfying human connections: regular social exchanges, a sense of belonging and support from friends, family and others in the community, having close bonds with others, and feeling loved, cared for, valued, and appreciated.
But this essential ingredient is trending downward in our lives. The Social Connection in America Report of 2025, led by researcher Juliane Holdt-Lundstadt, found that loneliness, social isolation, and social disengagement are widespread, with especially low levels of social participation. Americans report few close friends (40% 2 or less), few monthly gatherings (72% get together 2x/mo or less), less participation in clubs (57% are not in one), less close neighborhoods (only 27% close knit). The report called for a “comprehensive approach that moves beyond simply alleviating loneliness to rebuilding and fortifying the structure necessary for individual and community health.”
An Exciting Imperative and Mandate
With this new-found institutional and evidence-backed awareness that social connection is a basic need and community health depends on it, communities have a clear imperative and mandate to make connection to its own cause: to make it easy for people to obtain, and to increase belonging in our communities through intentional programs to bring people together, and embed connection into the fabric of everyday places, so that it doesn't depend on chance, individual effort, or luck.
In other words, if connected communities and social connection is essential to our individual and collective health and well being, then it follows that social connection should be just as easy to find and obtain as other basic needs, and not left to chance. We can approach the cause with a few guiding principles:
Reframe the problem: Loneliness is a symptom. Social disconnection isn’t a problem to be solved by each individual individually, it’s a consequence of inadequate social infrastructure and other cultural norms.
Ownership:
An organization or collection of organizations should exist in each community whose primary focus is to ensure adequate social connection for its members.
Every community should have an organization, group, or city resources devoted to the cause of connection, just as our cities have those devoted to other elements of public health, safety, housing, and homelessness.
Design:
We should be intentionally connecting our communities, weaving connection opportunities into existing social infrastructure, and adding new pieces as necessary.
Our businesses and organizations should feel empowered to invite social connection into the places we go, help strangers meet eachother, and help design events to increase the chances of meaningful interactions.
We should be empowered to design public spaces and community activities that make it easy for people to meet each other and talk to strangers.
Access: No one should need an existing social circle, luck, or bravery to participate and socialize at events and public places. Whether someone shows up alone or with a group, opportunities for conversation should be easy.
Intentional Connection Initiatives Efforts Overview
This echoes the 2023 Surgeon General report, which called on community organizations to create opportunities and spaces for inclusive social connection and establish programs that foster meaningful relationships, and above all, to create a culture of connection in the broader community.
The following are ways communities can put that into practice:
Actively support residents in creating close knit neighborhoods: Create a strong neighborhoods initiative, anchored by a neighborhood/block connector program, with monthly meetings and tools of support for connectors.
Normalize and demonstrate fun and successful connection driven events: Intentionally connect community members with one another at events through structured interaction and built in.
Help people connect to clubs: Hold a quarterly club expo and club generator event.
Add new design standards and social infrastructure at places and events: Create spaces within the everyday places and events we go where spontaneous connection with strangers is welcome, expected, and normal.
Special Connection events: Create monthly, quarterly, and annual city wide events designed around community building like potlucks, Porchfest, city themed scavenger hunts, and civic days.
Engage employers & the workforce: Engage employers and their employees through special connected community retreat and team building days.
Continually innovate and collect feedback: Create a connection lab monthly gathering that invites community input on improvements and new ideas for connection events, placemaking, and more.
And more: There are many other categories to add, including Intergenerational programs that connect older adults in the community with youth through joint purposes like story telling, community history, or problem solving.
Support an Ongoing Strong Neighborhoods Program
One of the opportunities we all have to increase our day to day social connection is close to home in our own yards, streets in our neighborhood, or apartment lobbies. Wouldn’t it be great if more of us felt we could introduce ourselves to our neighbors?
Connected neighborhoods lead to increased care of neighbors, care of shared spaces, civic engagement and economic growth opportunities, social and cultural wellness, safety, activated and shared knowledge, creativity and innovation. Close knit neighborhoods don’t have to be left to chance. Communities can activate and support outgoing members to make it a reality with a neighborhood connector program.
Neighborhood Connector Program
Neighborhood Connector is a volunteer who helps neighbors know each other. They:
Walk the block inviting those interested to create opportunities for sharing of skills, interests, meeting needs, sharing visions for the neighborhood, and attending gatherings.
Create neighbor hosted gatherings and events to help implement neighborhood projects and activities.
Encourage neighbors to share their interests and skills with one another.
Ensure the neighborhood is aware of community opportunities.
Welcome new people to the neighborhood.
Organize larger block parties.
For program success, communities support neighborhood connectors with:
Monthly opportunity to gather with other connectors and exchange ideas: share what you tried, what worked, who you connected with, and troubleshoot together.
Planning tools and activity templates: tip sheets, sample invitation letters, connector info cards, an event-planning guide.
Ideas to foster neighborhood connection: gathering tips, recurring group ideas like block parties, zero prep potlucks, a neighborhood watch, neighborhood musician gatherings, celebrations, common interests.
Help from community organizations for planning and implementing neighborhood activities.
A city wide neighborhood connector goal, e.g. Prospecting for Dreams, invitation to interview neighbors on their ideas for the city to go in annual compilation to seed projects.
A shared skills-and-item library and online doc for neighbors to log what they can offer each other.
Direct sponsorship from a local health organization.
Connection-Driven Events
Communities can weave the ingredient of intentional connection into existing event series.
In decades past, simply putting on events and creating third places for people to be was enough to foster new friendships. But in modern society, proximity does not guarantee new acquaintances or meaningful relationships. Getting people into the same space is the easy part; what's missing at most events is the intentional structure that helps people start conversations with people other than who they came with.
What’s required is more opportunities to attend Connection Driven Events — events organized, through activity, built-in structure, or hosting, to help people interact with others there. Connection driven events:
Are inclusive of people who attend alone — given a built-in way to meet people
Do not require an act of social bravery to meet new people. The event itself provides context and permission to approach strangers, or people you haven’t talked to recently.
Engage people in something together that naturally leads to conversation and allow them to actively participate.
Some ways to create them
Nearly any event can become connection-driven with a few intentional additions. Some examples:
An opt-in signal (pin, sticker, lanyard) for openness to chat, prompt-card human bingo
Coded pre-event groups for structured conversation before main program
Name tags with a conversation hooks, hosts to actively introduce newcomers
Timed small-group rotations, small-group breakouts with story-sharing
Collaborative activities to be creative together
Designated "meet new people here" conversation area,
When starting the event, such as announcing new musicians at outdoor music events, Invite everyone to say hi to someone new and talk for a few minutes over with a specific prompt
Have a theme for conversations and include simple temporary rules like no job talk, politics, etc., that level the social playing field.
Active hosts, mixing up where people sit, dedicated mixer moments separate from main activity.
In addition to adding these elements to standard events, communities can create special events where making new and meaningful connections is the purpose of how the event is organized, where having in-depth conversations on various topics to get to know people is the expectation of attendees and the design of its structure and activities.
Place & Built Environment
Research shows people like talking to strangers and get a lot out of it. The main barrier is the uncertainty of whether others are open to talk. We need to add in social structures that remove this uncertainty. Our everyday places (and events) where people gather are in the best position to solve this issue. If they simply invite visitors and guests to connect with simple and fun programs and social infrastructure, people will do the rest.
Remove the uncertainty:
Spontaneous Connection Spot Tables (MingleSpaces) — recruit businesses, parks, farmers markets, coffee shops, restaurants, breweries, etc. to designate a table with a connection sign inviting people to sit and meet new people, using welcoming signs with a QR code linking to conversation-starter prompts.
Everyday Connection Culture:
Install citywide connection challenges (talk to one new stranger a week at connection spots).
Design "bumping spaces," fun installations that people naturally stop at and meet new people and strangers as part of the installation's activity and design, like activity art and creative vision boards, talk to stranger challenges, etc.
Have a city wide running question of the week to ask a stranger at participating businesses, with the option to submit results for collection.
Ensure adequate third places exist where people can encounter each other
Third-Place Needs Assessment — engage the community to map where functioning third places exist, where the gaps are, and potential improvements
Reimagine places and spaces beyond their primary function to bring people together
Work with local businesses on building easy ways to meet-people into their existing spaces
Create toolkit for businesses/city/orgs on physical design and tools that invite connection
Ensure adequate community centers or other third places exist that have spaces where people can hold and attend events regularly and return often multiple times a week for different types of programming.
Programmed Events & Experiences
Weekly morning coffee & connection social — a regular connection driven event, low-barrier, open-invite, built-in social games.
Monthly story telling theme community potlucks — community members have a chance to make meaningful connections over stories and meet new people.
Monthly Culture Nights — art night / open mic / poetry night, combined or separate depending on scale, intersperse musical offerings with conversation breakouts. Invite local musicians only, and university art students or other local artists to run workshops.
Citywide Club Expo Convention — organize a club expo quarterly where all clubs in the area are invited to set up stations, recruit new members, and take turns demoing their club activity on the main stage. Include a club generator station where people can share ideas for new clubs they’d like to see and get connected later.
Employer sponsored community building series — multiple employers mix employees into groups at a retreat put on by a local community organization for team building, community games, and conversation break outs.
Help strengthen people’s friendships with their coworkers, make friends from other employers in town.
Help integrate them into the community by including sessions of the day that link them to city wide connection resources and programs like neighborhood connectors, clubs, and other initiatives.
Open/play street days — Recurring street closures for community mingling and kids games, so it becomes a walkable, mingling public space.
Signature Big Events — city scavenger hunts with city culture themed and interactive games between teams, a regular Porchfest, citywide civic celebration/service days with mass volunteering signups followed by a potluck and community games and celebration, a Riverwest-24-style city wide connected block parties event, a "Big Table" hosted-conversation make new connections event, or a combination of these.
Connection Lab
Create a monthly gathering for people who want to make it easier for people to meet, belong, participate, and build relationships. Bring together residents, organizers, artists, businesses, community leaders, and others to imagine and prototype new events, clubs, gathering places, placemaking, fun city challenges, and other ways of connecting and making the culture more welcoming and friendly. Doubles as a continuous feedback loop for all standing initiatives and community needs.
During the design phase, and as needed, engage community partners and solicit feedback as community connection initiatives are implemented and designed.
This last element is also the first perhaps the most important. In-person social connection is by definition local. Community programs must come from within each community and be tailored to their needs, and more importantly, be generated by the excitement and passion of its own members that will create, maintain, and grow them.
Resources & Further Reading
Neighborhood/Block Connector programs:
Spruce Grove's Connection Cultivators (in depth plan) https://www.sprucegrove.org/community/programs/connection-cultivators/
Stony Plain's Neighborhood Connect (in depth plan) https://www.stonyplain.com/live/neighbourhood-connect/#BenefitsofNeighbouring
The Abundant Community Initiative (McKnight & Block):
Community Works Michigan Connectors:
More Neighboring Resources:
The Hopeful Neighborhood Project:
Kindness close to home Columbus Foundation: https://columbusfoundation.org/building-social-capital/center-for-humankindness/kindness-close-to-home
Cambridge Meet your Neighbor Month:
Hi Neighbor Program
Clubs Connection Expo / JoinUp Fair
Pittsburg Social Health Expo https://pghsocialhealth.substack.com/p/recap-the-psh-connection-expo
Oakland joiners and connection studio
Join or die documentary about clubs
Placemaking ideas
Spontaneous Connection spots (MinglesSpaces):
Community living rooms and volunteer led conversation tables:
More on Connection Driven Events
Potlucks
National and International Facts about Social Connection
Vivek Murthy Surgeon General report:
Social connection in America survey:
California Social Health Council
WHO commission report on social connection
Intergenerational strategies
Foundation for Social Connection Roadmap & Action Guide
https://www.social-connection.org/socialcapital/key-findings-roadmap/ "We are calling for a movement of social connection across communities that encourages diverse cultures to build the collective will to work together to change systems so all people can thrive. This requires the slower, deeper work of relationship building, where people have opportunities to exchange stories, see each other’s humanity, and commit to advancing equitable systems and collective wellbeing.""
Special thanks to all of the above listed resources for your amazing work and passion to bring us together.
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