ABOUT US
Building the infrastructure for the global social connection field
The Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC) brings together practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and advocates committed to addressing social disconnection across disciplines, sectors, and regions.
WHAT WE DO
Turning knowledge into action.
We build the mechanisms that strengthen what already exists — mobilizing knowledge across borders, making collaboration easier, reducing duplication, and ensuring hard-won momentum translates into real change.
GILC's convenings with global members
OUR HISTORY
From one Zoom call to a global network.
GILC began with one conversation between leaders in Australia and the United States who realized they could move further and faster by learning from one another.
That exchange grew to include more organizations across more countries. Leaders began sharing research, policy lessons, and practical approaches rather than rebuilding the same knowledge in isolation. What started as a handful of people on a screen grew into a global network spanning all six WHO regions.
Today, GILC works alongside hundreds of collaborators to strengthen the field of social connection.
Prof. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Edward Garcia, and Prof. Michelle Lim at a WHO convening
GILC has built the connective infrastructure for the social connection field — through relationships, trust, expertise, and sustained conviction.
OUR APPROACH
We create the conditions for a field that learns, acts, and grows together
GILC works across four interdependent pillars — ensuring the right people are in the room, the right knowledge is on the table, the right structures exist for collaboration, and the right norms guide how we work together.
All disciplines at the table — researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and advocates — because no single sector or region holds the full picture. Global to local: international institutions, national bodies, and community organizations across all six WHO regions.
We create knowledge so it travels and doesn't sit in reports that nobody reads. Field intelligence, implementation toolkits, and ongoing knowledge streams that cross borders and disciplines: so the field learns in real time, not in retrospect.
The structures that make collaboration easier, reduce duplication, and turn growing momentum into collective impact: learning collaboratives, shared coordination infrastructure, and a global conference that gives the ecosystem a shared operating rhythm.
How we show up is as important as what we build. Our only interest is that everyone succeeds. GILC is relational, knowledge-driven, equity-centered, and focused on connecting and elevating everyone in the field.
GILC's Global Connection Forum bringing together experts to explore the relationship between polarization and social connection.
Pictured: Suparna Chhibber, GILC; Ray Block, RAND; Michael Shipler, Search for Common Ground; Jason Mangone, More in Common.
POSITION STATEMENTS
A shared evidence-based foundation for action.
GILC's six position statements define what the network believes, establish shared concepts, and set out recommendations for policy, practice, and research. They give the global field a common language and a common starting point for coordinated global action on social connection, loneliness, and social isolation.
01
Social connection is essential to health and wellbeing.
02
Loneliness, social isolation and social negativity are distinct experiences.
03
Social wellbeing is distinct from related concepts such as depression or solitude.
04
A wide range of risk factors can increase vulnerability to loneliness and social isolation.
05
Evidence-based solutions are needed to reduce disconnection and increase connection.
06
Addressing structural and practical barriers to connection is central to effective action.