Battery Powered Is Backing Reimagine's Work on Loneliness

This spring, Battery Powered awarded Reimagine $128,600 to support our work on loneliness.

Battery Powered is the collective giving arm of The Battery in San Francisco. Its members pool their giving and choose together, each season, which organizations receive it under a chosen theme. This season the theme was Combating Loneliness. Eight organizations were selected, sharing just over $1.1 million.

We applied because loneliness is the thing underneath most of what we do, even when nobody calls it that.

There is a growing body of work on loneliness now, and most of it is about social connection: how many people you know, how often you see them. That is real, but it misses something. You can be surrounded by people and still be completely alone, because the thing you are actually carrying is the thing you cannot say out loud.

That is the gap we work in. In a Reimagine survey of more than 3,000 people, 85% said our culture makes it very difficult to talk about life's hardest experiences. Illness, caregiving, a death, a marriage ending, a body changing. These arrive, and people go quiet, because there is nowhere obvious to put the words. The isolation is not a side effect of the hard thing. It is a second hard thing, stacked on the first.

What this funding makes possible

Three pieces of work over the next two years.

Keeping groups together after they end. Our facilitated group programs run ten weeks, and the most common thing people tell us afterward is that they do not want it to stop. We are building a way for those groups to keep meeting on their own, and training past participants to lead new ones for people in their own lives.

A Companions Program. Loneliness gets worse when the people standing nearby do not know what to say, so they say nothing. That is a skill, and it can be taught. We want to teach it briefly and practically to the friends, family members and volunteers who are already there. The goal is 10,000 people trained in two years.

Connecting what we already have. Right now an event is an event. We want every gathering to open into something ongoing, so that the thousands of people who come to us each year have somewhere to go next instead of going cold.

Thank you

Grants like this one do not arrive on their own. They arrive because there is something to point at: nearly ten years of gatherings, roughly 250,000 people who showed up for them, and a community that keeps making the case that these conversations matter. Funders read that signal. Battery Powered read it.

So this is a thank you, and it is meant literally. To everyone who has sat through a vigil, hosted an event, brought a friend or made a gift: you are the reason there was an application worth funding.

Reimagine is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our programs are free because people give. Learn how to support this work