From shared musical experiences and storytelling traditions to community sports leagues and neighborhood gatherings, arts, culture, and leisure are fundamental to how we connect, find belonging, and create shared meaning. Yet despite their profound impact, these sectors have often been undervalued — resulting in chronic underinvestment and missed opportunities to strengthen well-being. In this report, we ask you to consider: what if arts, culture, and leisure were more intentionally leveraged to address social isolation, loneliness, and social connection?
This report marks the sixth installment in our SOCIAL Framework series, translating research into practical, evidence-based strategies that can be applied across the life course and at multiple levels of influence.
We have developed these reports to be living documents, constantly adapting to new research and policy updates. As such, we welcome your feedback on the report!
After reading this report, you will be able to:
Describe and understand arts, culture, and leisure as interconnected systems, spaces, and practices that shape social life, including how individuals and communities access, experience, and participate across institutional, communal, and informal settings.
Identify how arts, culture, and leisure opportunities can either support or hinder social connection – from barriers to access, representation, and inclusion to funding structure, program design, and policy.
Apply promising strategies and examples for increasing social connectedness through arts, culture, and leisure – across multiple levels of influence (individual, interpersonal, institutional/organizational, community, and societal) and tailored roles of various stakeholders, including public health agencies, community-based organizations, and practitioners.
This report explores opportunities to foster social connection through the arts, culture, and leisure sectors, which encompass the full range of systems, spaces, creative practices, cultural traditions, programs, and policies that influence how people access and participate in arts, cultural life, and leisure. In this report, we examine how culture shapes and informs shared meaning, identity, and belonging; how arts, culture, and leisure provide avenues for expression and collective experience; and how leisure functions as an active social process that generates recurring interaction, shared rituals, and voluntary association–creating settings where relationships, social norms, and identities are formed and reinforced through ongoing participation. Together, we examine how these domains, through both intentional design and investment as well as grassroots, community-driven practices and everyday participation, can influence how people relate to one another, experience belonging, and connect across differences.
In line with the Foundation’s previous SOCIAL Framework reports, we discuss key stakeholders and promising strategies for fostering social connectedness and addressing social isolation and loneliness through the design, planning, policy, and use of the arts, culture, and leisure sectors. By the conclusion of this report, readers will be equipped with language, examples, and strategies to support efforts to strengthen social connection within the arts, culture, and leisure sectors.
Join us on May 20th for a webinar where we’ll dive into how arts, culture, and leisure can be leveraged to strengthen social connection and improve both individual and community outcomes.
Featuring a fireside chat with experts who contributed to the report, we’ll discuss actionable strategies and real-world examples for advancing social connection through systems change and community engagement. We’ll also highlight the importance of designing these opportunities with intention, addressing barriers to access, and ensuring equitable participation so that social connection is fostered across diverse communities.
Whether you are an artist, cultural leader, policymaker, educator, public health professional, philanthropist, or community advocate, this webinar invites you to reimagine arts, culture, and leisure as central to building more connected, inclusive, and resilient communities.
A brief overview of how the Foundation is putting the framework into action:
We connect partners from different sectors and levels of influence to support united, multi-sector work.
Through our innovation work, we share evidence-based strategies and learnings with partners who can implement and test approaches shared in the SOCIAL Framework Reports.
Our research informs policy development at our sister organization, The Foundation for Social Connection Action Network.
If you are designing, implementing, researching, or testing a solution for social connectedness through the arts, culture, and leisure sectors, we’d love to learn more! Please contact us and share what you are doing to advance social connection through these sectors!