There are things that can be done to address loneliness and social isolation.
This resource brings together the policy ideas, from around the world, that governments, communities, schools, workplaces, and care systems can act on. It is a working library for the people doing that work: a place to find the levers, the precedents, and the next steps.
Loneliness and social isolation are shaped by public conditions: housing, transit, income, care, and the design of the places we live. They can be addressed by changing those things, and people, in many countries, already are. This resource gathers what they have done, and what could be done here.
Health is more than the absence of illness.
The World Health Organization has defined health as social as well as physical and mental. This resource takes that social dimension seriously, and treats it as something policy can shape.
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Social Wellbeing (noun)
The dimension of an individual’s health that relates to their relationships and interactions with others: encompassing their social position, the sufficiency of their social networks, the quality of their relationships, and their ability to form positive and meaningful connections with others in all areas of their life.
Where the work happens.
The policies in this resource span several policy domains, the broad areas where governments and communities can act. Each policy domain makes its own case for the work that needs doing.
What governments, organizations, and communities can do about loneliness.
A working catalogue of policies and practices that reduce social isolation, spanning every level of government, the institutions people pass through daily, and the neighbourhoods and groups they belong to. Narrow the list by who could implement a policy and by the populations it most directly serves. Entries with a fully developed brief are marked.
Find the policies that fit your situation.
Six quick questions about who you are, what you can spend, how fast you need results, and whom you want to reach. We rank every policy in this resource to the ones that fit, and show why each made the list. Prefer to browse? Open the full directory.
See how the policies compare.
Plot every policy against two dimensions of your choosing: impact on loneliness, relevance, strength of evidence, or the cost, time, political lift, and coordination it takes to deliver. Each circle is one policy. A solid circle sits at the median of the expert ratings it has received; a hollow, dashed circle shows our editorial default until experts weigh in. Hover for the title, click to open the brief. How the ratings work.
Categories
Each colour is a policy category. Click to hide or show.
show allThe policies you've endorsed.
A running list of the policies and practices you've signalled deserve attention. Your endorsements are saved to your account, so this list follows you across devices.
A working library to build from.
This resource exists to make the policy conversation about loneliness and social isolation more concrete. It collects the policies and practices that already exist, somewhere, in some form, and the proposals that have not yet been tried, so that the people thinking about what to do next have something to start from.
What this is
An interactive, browsable directory of policies and practices. Each one is treated as something a reader can pick up, modify, combine, or set aside. Where the work has been done, you'll find a fully developed brief: the proposal and how it could be adapted, the rationale connecting it to loneliness, examples from jurisdictions that have already implemented something close, the evidence base, and an honest path to making it real. Where the work is still ahead, you'll find a placeholder that names the policy and tells you which actors and populations it most concerns.
The resource is built around two ways of finding things. You can browse by policy domain, the broad areas where work happens. Or you can open the directory and filter by the actor who could implement a policy, and the population it would most directly serve.
What this isn't
It does not endorse any particular policy. Different ideas suit different orders of government, different communities, and different political moments. It offers references to weigh rather than prescriptions to follow.
It is also not finished, and probably never will be. New policies and practices will be added as they surface; existing ones will be revised or removed as evidence develops. If something looks wrong, or if there's a policy you think belongs here and doesn't, please get in touch.
Who this is for
Public servants developing federal, provincial, or municipal strategies. Parliamentarians and political staff drafting platforms, briefs, and legislation. Civil society organizations advocating for specific reforms. Community foundations and funders deciding where to put resources. Researchers situating their work in a policy frame. Anyone tired of "we should do something about loneliness" who is looking for a starting point for what.
How the ratings work
Many of the briefs carry ratings: how directly the policy bears on loneliness, how squarely it targets the problem, how strong the evidence is, and how heavy a lift it is to deliver across cost, time, political resistance, and coordination. These ratings are not the verdict of a single author. They are the pooled judgment of the experts who use the site.
The approach draws on what is sometimes called the wisdom of the crowds. Ask one person to estimate something and the answer carries that person\u2019s particular blind spots. Ask many informed people to judge independently and take the middle of their answers, and the individual errors tend to offset one another, leaving an estimate that is frequently closer to the mark than any one expert would have reached alone. We report the median of the votes rather than the average, so a single outlying judgment cannot pull the result around.
Every dimension carries an editorial default, our own cautious reading of the policy, which is shown until registered experts weigh in. We do not count the editor as an expert, so a brief that carries only the editorial rating still reports zero expert reviewers. Once a single expert rates a dimension, the displayed value switches to the median of the expert votes, and it settles further as more experts contribute.
You can see this for yourself. The Explore tool plots any two of these dimensions against each other and lets you filter to the policies you care about, so you can watch where the collective judgment places them.