December 9, 2025
By: Edward Garcia, Foundation for Social Connection Founder; Annette Fellows, Board Chair; and Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, MPH, Executive Director
When the Foundation for Social Connection (F4SC) launched five years ago, few funders were thinking explicitly about social connection, social infrastructure, or the measurable health consequences of isolation. The issue was diffuse, often misunderstood, and rarely treated as a systemic challenge.
Today, social connection is emerging as its own field and one increasingly backed by evidence, bipartisan policy interest, cross-sector investment, and community innovation. Philanthropy has played an important role in this shift, but the opportunity ahead is even larger.
As F4SC marks its five-year anniversary, we’re reflecting on what we’ve learned from building a national movement and what the philanthropic sector can do now to accelerate progress.
Disconnection is foundational, not peripheral. Its impacts show up in health outcomes, economic mobility, educational attainment, civic trust, workplace culture, and community resilience. Yet investments in social connection remain fragmented and dramatically under-resourced compared to the scale of the need.
Over the past five years, F4SC has worked to build a more coherent, evidence-informed field. Through research translation, community practice sites, systems-change partnerships, and cross-sector convenings, we’ve seen several truths emerge:
Funders continue to invest primarily in individual- or program-level interventions. These efforts matter, but they cannot shift the conditions; workplace design, urban planning, education systems, digital environments, community infrastructure—that shape connection at scale.
There is an enormous untapped opportunity for philanthropy to fund structural solutions and cross-sector experimentation.
Measuring connection remains inconsistent across institutions. We’ve been working with researchers, communities, and federal partners to advance common frameworks. Philanthropy can accelerate this by supporting:
Without standards, the field cannot scale effectively.
Local leaders know what promotes (and hinders) connection in their communities. But they need long-term support to test, refine, and spread solutions.
Through our community cohorts, we’ve seen that the most significant breakthroughs come when local partners have:
This is an area where philanthropy can dramatically accelerate progress.
As more sectors recognize the role of connection—business, health systems, education, and local governments—a coordination gap has emerged. Philanthropy can fund the backbone organizations, field-building intermediaries, and convening structures that allow collective action to take root.
Looking forward, F4SC is expanding efforts to:
These are not isolated projects; they are scaffolding for a stronger, more coherent field.
For funders interested in shaping the future of social connection, this is a strategic moment.
Investments in this space advance:
Every dollar invested helps build the knowledge, partnerships, and infrastructure needed to make connection a measurable, integrated priority across society.
As we enter our next five years, we invite funders and partners to join us to help move from experimentation to scale, from scattered investments to coordinated strategies, and from awareness to action.