Practice guidance
The Institute turns research on social connection into programme design, referral pathways and evaluation that practitioners can actually use.
Funding & Commissioning
A funding decision that looks like one choice is often two: pay for a service with defined outputs, or pay for a community with none. Confusing them is what breaks programmes at renewal.
Community Practice
A sequenced approach to setting up health-to-community referral partnerships for social connection, built around the point most pilots miss: the community organisation's capacity.
Social Prescribing
Informal social prescribing sends isolated people into unsupervised community settings with volunteers, not clinicians. Here is what a safeguarding structure for that actually needs to cover.
Health & Care Systems
A look at how structured remote delivery has outperformed in-person befriending in the strongest available trials, and what that does and does not mean for a social prescribing service choosing a modality.
Social Prescribing
The evidence on volunteer befriending is thinner and less favourable to informal models than most programme managers assume. Here is what that should change about recruitment, training, and role design.
Social Prescribing
Buffet, Timeleft, 222, Pie, Meetup, Eventbrite, Luma and Partiful get recommended to isolated clients as if they were one thing. They are four different things. A decision framework for link workers, and the four cases where referring is defensible.
Volunteer-led social groups sit awkwardly between clinical services and pure informality. A look at how organisations in this space have set safeguarding thresholds, trained non-professional facilitators, and decided what a volunteer is not responsible for.
The WHO Commission on Social Connection has given health systems a mandate to treat connection as a clinical concern. The bottleneck is not referral volume — it is whether community organisations can absorb it. Six decisions to make before you sign anything.
Community connection programmes almost always report outcomes for the people who turned up and nothing about the people who did not. A practical method for building a reach denominator you can defend to a funder, and why outcome data alone will mislead you.
Fortune, 2026
This is useful context for anyone designing community infrastructure or social connection interventions: it documents the erosion of informal, low-cost gathering spaces that programmes often assume still exist. Readers should treat the cost narrative as the reporter's explanatory frame rather than a tested causal finding, and look to dedicated research for mechanisms behind the decline.
University of Bristol and Nature Communications, 2026
This adds to the evidence base establishing loneliness as a determinant of health outcomes, which matters for anyone building the case for social connection interventions to funders or health commissioners. The findings describe association, not mechanism or intervention effect, so they should be read as motivation for action rather than evidence of what works.
Axios, 2026
Useful as framing context for why place-based social infrastructure matters, but it is journalism connecting existing datasets rather than new primary research; treat the geographic pattern as a lead for further investigation, not a finding on its own.