Connection by Design

Sep 21

11 min read

Updated: 2 hours ago

Building Communities Where Connection Isn't Left to Chance

By Michael Kirsch | September 21, 2026

This framework is drawn from research into what communities are doing around the country, along with my own observations and ideas.

It’s an exciting time for building connected communities.

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.

Yet social connection has become harder to find. The Social Connection in America Report of 2025, led by researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, found that loneliness, social isolation, and social disengagement are widespread, with especially low levels of social participation. Americans report few close relationships (40% with 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

With this newfound institutional and evidence-backed awareness that social connection is a basic need and our community health depends on it, communities have a clear imperative to treat connection as a good in itself — not merely to solve loneliness, but as something worth creating for its own sake. They have a clear imperative to make it something easy for people to find, to increase belonging in our communities through intentional programs to bring people together, and embed connection into the design of everyday places.

In other words, if social connection is essential to our individual and collective health and well being, then it follows that it should be just as easy to obtain as other basic needs, not left to chance. I believe we can approach this work with a few guiding principles:

Reframe the problem:
- Loneliness is a symptom. Social disconnection isn’t a problem to be solved on an individual by individual basis; it’s a consequence of inadequate social infrastructure. Focus on making social connection more abundant for all, not special programs for those reporting loneliness and isolation.
Ownership:
- Every community should have an organization, group, or dedicated city resource whose primary focus is ensuring adequate social connection for its members, with programs driven by local demand and feedback, and serving as a clearinghouse and collection point for ideas and inspiration drawn from within the community.
Design:
- We can intentionally connect our communities, weaving opportunities into existing social infrastructure and adding new pieces as necessary. Our businesses, organizations, and institutions should feel empowered to invite and build social connection into the places we go, design spaces and community activities that make it easy for people to meet and talk to strangers, and design events that increase the chances of meaningful interaction.
Access:
- No one should need an existing social circle, luck, or bravery to participate and socialize at events and public places. We can make sure that whether someone shows up alone or with a group, opportunities for conversation are easy to find.

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 positive relationships," and above all, to foster a culture of connection.

The Foundation for Social Connection's Roadmap offers a framework and an Action Guide for how communities can begin this work, identifying the people, places, and programs already working in your community to build connection and bringing them together.

Intentional Connection Initiatives

The following are some of the ways communities can put those principles into practice, drawing on approaches being explored and implemented across the country:

NEIGHBORHOOD CONNECTORS — Actively support residents in creating strong and close-knit neighborhoods, anchored by a neighborhood connector program with monthly meetings and tools of support for connectors.
PRINCIPLES for EVENTS — Normalize and demonstrate connection-driven events. Intentionally connect community members with one another at events through structured interaction and built in activities.
PLACES for CONNECTION
1. Everyday Connection Infrastructure — Invite strangers to interact at public places through added elements of design. Create spaces within the everyday places and events we go where spontaneous connection with strangers is welcome and expected.
2. Third places — Ensure adequate community centers or other third places exist that have spaces where people can hold and attend events and clubs regularly and return often for different types of programming.
SPECIAL EVENTS — Hold special events designed to connect people to the broader community. Create regular city wide events designed around community building like coffee socials, potlucks, Porchfest, city themed scavenger hunts, and civic days.
CLUBS — Help people connect to clubs. Hold a quarterly club expo and club generator event.
ENGAGE EMPLOYERS — Engage employers as partners in community connection — put on events that create opportunities for employees to connect with one another, meet people across the community, and plug in to local resources.
CONTINOUS INNOVATION & FEEDBACK — Create a connection lab monthly gathering that invites community input on improvements and new ideas for connection events, placemaking, and more.

Build Strong Neighborhoods

Connected neighborhoods lead to increased care of neighbors and shared spaces, civic engagement and economic growth opportunities, social and cultural wellness, safety, activated and shared knowledge, and creativity. Close-knit neighborhoods don’t have to be left to chance. Communities can activate and support residents to make it a reality with a neighborhood connector program.

Neighborhood Connector Program

A 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 projects and activities.
Encourage neighbors to share their interests and skills with one another.
Ensure the neighborhood is aware of community opportunities and welcome new people to the neighborhood.
Organize block parties.

For program success, communities can support neighborhood connectors with:

A monthly opportunity to gather with other connectors and exchange ideas: share what they tried, what worked, who they connected with, and troubleshoot together.
Planning tools and activity templates: tip sheets, sample invitation letters, connector info cards.
Ideas to foster neighborhood connection: gathering tips and group ideas like zero prep potlucks, a neighborhood watch, neighborhood musician gatherings, and around celebrations and common interests.
Help from community organizations for planning and implementing neighborhood activities.
A city wide neighborhood connector goal, such as an invitation to interview neighbors on their visions for the city (e.g. Prospecting for Dreams) that then feed into Connection Lab meetings (see below) and seed community 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.

Normalize 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 frequent 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 relatively easy; what's missing at most events is the intentional structure that helps people start conversations with people other than those they came with.

What’s required is more opportunities to attend connection-driven events — ones that are intentionally organized by event organizers and venues, through activity, built-in structure, or hosting, to help people interact.

Connection-driven events:

Make connection accessible to people who attend alone. They provide a built-in way for someone to participate and meet others without having to figure it out on their own.
Do not require an act of social bravery to meet new people and initiate conversation. The event itself provides context and permission to approach strangers, or people you don't know well.
Intentionally create opportunities for interaction. Through activities, introductions, conversation prompts, hosting, or other structures, the event creates natural opportunities for people to connect rather than leaving interaction to chance.

Some ways to create them

Nearly any event or gathering can become connection-driven with a few additional elements. Some examples:

An opt-in signal (pin, sticker, lanyard) for openness to chat, prompt-card human bingo at arrival.
Send people at check in to join color coded pre-event conversation groups before main program.
Name tags with conversation hooks, like "ask me X", hosts that actively introduce newcomers.
At the start, or in between acts on stage, invite the audience or participants to say hi to someone new and talk for a few minutes over a specific prompt.
Timed small-group rotations and/or small-group breakouts with story-sharing.
Collaborative activities to be creative together.
Create a designated "meet new people here" conversation area.
Have a theme for the event and conversations or include gathering rules that help people engage and open up.
Active hosts throughout, mixing up where people sit, dedicated mingling separate from main activity.
Make connection seating built into getting tickets for sporting events, concerts, or when booking or choosing tables at casual restaurants and eateries.

Places for Connection
1. Everyday Connection Infrastructure

Research shows people like talking to strangers and most often have a good time when they do. The main barrier is the uncertainty of whether others are open to talk. What's missing is a simple signal or social structure that removes this uncertainty, such as a designated spot at the places we go where people have permission to introduce themselves.

Not an event. No host. No staff. Just a space where it's expected, encouraged, and normal to start a conversation with someone you haven't met yet. Our everyday places where people gather (coffee shops, parks, museums, festivals, farmers markets, restaurants, breweries, concerts) are in the best position to create it. If they simply designate spaces for spontaneous connection, people will do the rest.

Spontaneous Connection Spot Tables — recruit businesses and organizations to designate a space as a connection spot inviting people to sit and meet new people, such as with a welcoming signs linking to conversation-starter prompts.
Everyday Connection Culture:
- Install citywide connection challenges and programs (e.g. 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.
See the Foundation for Social Connection's Built Environment Framework report for many more placemaking ideas.

b. Third Places

Ensure functioning third places exist where people can interact with other members of the community naturally:

Engage the community to map where third places exist, where the gaps are, and ways they could be used beyond their primary function to be more effective in bringing people together.
Work with local businesses on building easy meet-people/conversation-starter mechanisms and similar additions into their existing spaces.
Create tips for other businesses/city/orgs on adding these mechanisms and physical design elements.

Special Community Events & Gatherings

Weekly morning coffee & connection social — create a weekly or bi-weekly open coffee social that is a low-barrier, open-invite, where everyone is welcome to meet people over organized prompts or open mingling. It can also serve as a regular entry point for people new to the community to meet neighbors and connect with local clubs, organizations, and community resources.
Monthly community potlucks — provide members of the community a recurring potluck gathering where they can be heard and share stories, engage in guided meaningful conversations topics around a monthly theme that helps people get to know each other, and meet people in the community they’ve never met. Have regular attendees become featured story tellers, add in community program sharing, an open mic signup period, and more.
Culture nights — celebrate local artists and musicians regularly with an opportunity for open mics at prominent community venues. Provide platform for local artists and university students to run interactive workshops in the city center.
Signature Big Events — a number of regular flagship gatherings:
- Citywide civic celebration/service days — mass volunteer signups followed by a potluck, community games, and celebration. Ideas for service/volunteering projects come from Neighborhood Connector selected community needs and dreams.
- A Porchfest style event — that invites neighbors to meet neighbors on porches and yards. Themes could vary. Neighborhood connectors could help coordinate.
- Connected block parties — a day of multiple simultaneous block parties welcome to all connected with bike paths with activities, in the style of "Riverwest-24."
- A "Big Table" style event — hosted tables with conversation prompts, designed for making new connections.
- City scavenger hunt — interactive activities across downtown celebrating local culture.
- More ideas for these developed at the Connection Lab below.
Open/play street days — have recurring street closures for community mingling and kids games, so it becomes a walkable space.

Clubs & Ongoing Groups

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.
Club generator station — include a club generator station at the expo and elsewhere in town where people can share ideas for new clubs they’d like to see and get connected later.

Employer-Sponsored Community Building Series

Connect coworkers to each other and the wider community. Mix employees of multiple employers into groups at day-long retreats put on by a local community organization based on connection-driven event principles:

Help strengthen people’s friendships with their coworkers and make friends from other employers in town.
Help integrate people into the community by including sessions of the retreat that link them to city wide connection resources and programs like neighborhood connectors, clubs, and other initiatives.
Expose the employer to practices they can incorporate into the workplace.

Connection Innovation Labs

Create a monthly gathering for anyone who wants to make it easier for people to meet, belong, participate, and build relationships — and to think up new, innovative ways for people to gather. Bring together interested residents, organizers, artists, businesses, and community leaders to:

Imagine and design new events, clubs, gathering places, placemaking ideas, and fun city challenges.
Track progress on existing initiatives.
Hear from neighborhood connectors about their learning through their outreach and idea collection process.
Serve as a continuous feedback loop for all standing initiatives and community needs.

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 the people who live there. During the design process, and as needed, engage partners and solicit feedback as connection initiatives are implemented.

Conclusion

This framework is based on the principle of strength and creativity from within.

The foundation, and its throughline, is the neighborhood connector: someone who gathers neighbors together, draws out their dreams and ideas for their community, brings those ideas together with other connectors through regular meetings, and feeds them into regular design sessions with community leaders, event organizers, artists, and others.

At the center of the framework, and as its supporting structure, is the creation of a culture that encourages businesses, organizations, and institutions to build connection into the places and events where people already gather.

The guiding principle and spirit, as embodied by a regular connection lab, is continuous creative design and social artistry in the ways people connect and come together.

The new imperative to make meaningful social connection abundant for all opens up a whole new field in the way we think about events, gatherings, public spaces, everyday places, and the many other ways people connect. By adopting this framework and its principles for connection, we can unlock the potential of missed connections all around us.

"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." - The Foundation for Social Connection, Social Capital Roadmap