Champions Toolkit: Social Connection Resources to Grow Your Capacity

Leverage these key resources to address loneliness and social isolation in your community.

Seminal Reports & Guides

Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community

Provides a comprehensive overview of the loneliness and isolation epidemic and introduces a National Strategy for Social Connection built on six pillars spanning policy, healthcare, community infrastructure, and culture.

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Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults

Summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older. This report also makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings to identify those experiencing social isolation or loneliness and to target interventions. 

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Action Guide for Building Socially Connected Communities

This Action Guide supports local leaders to create tailored social connection strategies. Communities can use this guide to engage partners, identify priorities, create a plan, and measure results. 

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Key Research Articles

Social connection as a critical factor for mental and physical health: evidence, trends, challenges, and future implications

Explores physiological pathways (like immune function and heart health) to show that social connection is one of the strongest predictors of mortality with evidence across biological, behavioral, and psychosocial pathways.

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Loneliness and social isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review

This seminal meta-analysis links loneliness and isolation to early mortality.

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Data, Maps, & Clearinghouses

Promising Approaches to Promote Social Connection

This list offers suggestions for promising approaches that individuals and organizations can use to reduce social isolation and loneliness and promote more frequent, high-quality relationships. Each intervention includes a description and examples.

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Geography of Social Isolation in U.S. Older Adults

An interactive tool designed so that the user can observe relationships between social isolation and other state and county-level characteristics that may otherwise be hidden, such as demographics and health behaviors. 

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Social Engagement Innovations Hub

A clearinghouse of social connection best practices and evidence-based interventions, programs, and services intended to provide practitioners, implementers, and researchers with information to encourage replication.  

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Commit to Connect Resources 

Commit to Connect developed this toolkit to grow the capacity of professionals and volunteers to promote social connections. Visit the Commit to Connect website for additional resources.
Learn more about Commit to Connect Learn more about the Nationwide Network of Champions