Making Connections, Part 3 of 3
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The Making Connections series wraps up the season with a forecast of 2025: What challenges and opportunities are we facing next year in addressing loneliness and social isolation? Guests include Julia Hotz, The Making Connections series wraps up the season with a forecast of 2025: What challenges and opportunities are we facing next year in addressing loneliness and social isolation? Guests include Julia Hotz, a journalist and author of the new book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service and Belonging, and Frederick J. Riley, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project.
Everyone is welcome. Bring your most pressing questions!
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together in the hopes of healing ourselves and the world. We specifically support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
About the series Making Connections
Join New York Times contributor and author Allison Gilbert for the latest Making Connections series exploring ways we can reduce social isolation and increase feelings of belonging.
Loneliness is an underdiscussed aspect of the grief experience and research shows that it can increase the risk of disease, mental illness, and shorten life expectancy. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy – a previous guest on Allison’s series – declared loneliness an epidemic and announced a strategy to help reverse this alarming trend.
The host of Making Connections is Allison Gilbert, one of the most influential writers and speakers on life’s deepest challenges, including grief and loss, caregiving and chronic illness, and the growing public health crisis of social isolation and loneliness. In partnership with Reimagine, she is hosting her latest series to reveal concrete strategies we can all use to build deeper connections. Allison is co-author of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s final book, The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life.
The series kicks off with actor Alysia Reiner, renowned for her starring role as “Fig” in Orange is the New Black, but also for what she does off screen: Alysia serves as a real-life volunteer firefighter in her beloved community. She and other guests will discuss how acts of service have the capacity to help us feel a greater sense of well-being and connection.
The second session addresses loneliness at work. This discussion features Eddie Garcia, Founder and Board Chair of the Foundation for Social Connection; Susan McPherson, author of The Lost Art of Connecting; and Ann Shoket, CEO of TheLi.st and co-author of the Ten Minutes to Togetherness Report and Tool Kit.
And in the final program of the series, we will forecast innovations to reduce loneliness in the year ahead with journalist Julia Hotz, author of the new book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service and Belonging, and Frederick J. Riley, Executive Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute.
Speakers
Julia Hotz is a solutions-focused journalist and author of The Connection Cure—the first book chronicling the science, stories, and spread of social prescribing. With inspiration from Indigenous wisdom, positive psychology, holistic healing, lifestyle and integrative medicine, palliative care, and all kinds of therapies, social prescribing is a rapidly spreading practice through which health workers “prescribe” community resources and activities—like art classes and sea swimming lessons—the same way they prescribe pills and therapies. It’s been operationally defined as a way for clinical and community professionals to connect people to “non-medical supports and services … to improve their health and strengthen their connections.” She works at the Solutions Journalism Network, where she helps other journalists rigorously report on what’s working to solve today’s biggest problems.
Before becoming a journalist, Julia worked as a teacher, bartender, pizza server, and summer camp “forest ranger”. She enjoys hiking up mountains, biking around New York, riling up dance floors, running around parks, budget traveling around the world, and building the ‘longest road’ around Catan.
https://www.socialprescribing.co/
Frederick J. Riley grew up in a tough neighborhood of Saginaw, Michigan where he didn’t have a lot, but he did have a community. His mother taught him that when times were tough, you shared what you had, offered emotional support, and showered love abundantly on everyone.
That’s what he gave and received from his community. His pastor convinced him he could grow up and be somebody. His high school English teacher regularly sent notes of encouragement with fifty dollars tucked inside while he was in college. She knew it was not an expected or easy rite of passage for someone like him. This network of people helped him weave a life path.
Now Riley leads the Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which supports people in communities everywhere who are weaving trust, connection, and hope. To pay forward the love of weavers in his life, Riley spent 16 years at various levels of the YMCA organization around the country. He helped build and fund programs that gave youth a sense of value and belonging while helping them prepare for life beyond high school.
Riley has nurtured community wherever he has lived – Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and now Washington, DC – yet he remains a proud son of Saginaw, Michigan. Among his many roles in professional and civic groups, he covets most the time he spends with his own family as a son, brother, uncle, and godfather, and with all the people who became family because of their care.
Host
Allison Gilbert is host of Reimagine’s Making Connections and Passed and Present conversation series and co-author of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s final book, The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life.
Allison is also author and co-author of numerous other books, including Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman; Passed and Present: Keeping Memories of Loved Ones Alive; and Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors and is a past Board Member of the National Alliance for Children’s Grief. A regular contributor to the New York Times and other publications, Allison launched Pub Day, a literary consultancy, to help women writers best-position their book ideas for publication.
