Goal

Around the globe young people are experiencing unique and serious challenges, including climate change, overpopulation and technology disruption. Recent analyses suggest that children and youth experience existential threat and disempowerment; they report pessimism about the future, civic disengagement, mental illness, and loneliness. There is evidence of a human flourishing deficit. In line with the Foundation's strategy, our goal is to create a flourishing surplus.
Our idea is that enhanced and supported social connections and collective purpose will enable young people to be empowered and therefore collectively flourish. Current approaches to aiding youth are largely individually-oriented (e.g., capabilities, counselling, coaching) and are simply insufficient. New approaches and tools are needed, and quickly.
The small but growing body of work on social connections and youth indicates that their sense of themselves as group members and connectedness with their groups (e.g., family, school) positively impacts their lives (e.g., well-being, mental health, loneliness). We propose to extend these models to also explore empowerment (e.g., co-operation, control, purpose, efficacy) and its outcomes (e.g., cohesion, support, coping, optimism). Ultimately, this idea enables us to rethink and revolutionize prevention strategies and interventions, and to generate new practices that enable youth collective flourishing.

Opportunity

Building on previously promising efforts, this project advances a new social connectedness model of empowerment and flourishing for children and youth. The central ideas are 1) the need to foster connections and collective purpose and 2) that collective flourishing is bolstered/sustained if such efforts are directed at improving the world. Youth organisations world-wide intuitively appreciate these insights. Yet, important questions remain. Is there evidence that existing connectedness interventions empower youth and promote collective flourishing? How can we upscale current efforts quickly and efficiently? This project offers a new and unique opportunity to answers these questions and generate a flourishing surplus.

Roadblocks

Three main challenges are:
1. Establishing shared and co-ordinated purpose among piecemeal stakeholders and interdisciplinary tensions. Disparate theory and research, and pockets of interventions, must be harnessed, extended and upscaled. Conceptual challenges must be overcome to move through disciplines and language-based divides concerning definition, measurement and methods.
2. Research funding and scale. The problem is global and long term so too then must be the response. Unfortunately, this mission does not match the funding priorities of national research funding bodies.
3. Personnel. The ambitious, applied outcomes require research specialists and experienced practitioners to trial new studies and then implement interventions.

Breakthroughs Needed

Roadblocks 1 and 2 require a co-ordinated, collective and innovative response. This translates into having the right 'social connectedness' leadership and consortium members who will offer interdisciplinary and international perspectives. Accelerators (NGOs) and end-users (young people) need to be involved from the outset. The network will integrate the pockets of disparate (often high quality) activity and shape it so the "whole is more than the sum of the parts". This includes creating a clear narrative and shared purpose, promoting high quality research, designing evidence-based interventions and producing highly accessible 'launch' materials and supports. Given the global project scope, funding opportunities for this network to function effectively and co-design key aspects of the project across countries (e.g., conceptual and measurement tools, identifying effective interventions and practices) will be key to success.
Regarding Roadblock 3, funding for personnel will be essential to: 1) integrate available data, resources and interventions on social connectedness (and its impact on empowerment and flourishing) into a Global Data hub; 2) conduct rigorous multi-site and multi-country studies on social connectedness processes and empowerment; and 3) accelerate scale through launch activities such as mobilizing champions, training and support

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Is the global network functioning effectively? Are there new measurement tools assessing youth connectedness, empowerment and flourishing? Were high-quality studies conducted? Are 3-6 interventions being designed/implemented? (no to one of these = failure).
5 years: Did we create proof-of-concept interventions and can they be widely implemented? Did interventions impact on indicators of empowerment and collective flourishing? Was the magnitude of these effects sufficient to warrant further investigation? (yes to first = success; no to remaining ≠ failure).
10 years: Have interventions been improved and upscaled? Is there ongoing evidence of collective flourishing (yes = success).

Additional Information

Technical summary:
In a major study, Steiner and colleagues (2019) examined young people's connectedness to their family and school. With a comprehensive and sophisticated series of analyses, they concluded that compared "to individuals with low scores for each type of connectedness, having high levels of both school and family connectedness was associated with 48% to 66% lower odds of health risk behaviors and experiences in adulthood, depending on the outcome" (p. 1). These findings are in line with growing literature on the impact of social connection and social identity on health. Research in this area shows that a sense of connectedness, i.e., identifying with and feeling connected to current (e.g., family, school) and new groups, results in lower loneliness, social anxiety and depression in adults (e.g., Jetten et al., 2009).
Even though connectedness has been demonstrated to improve mental health, two important questions remain unanswered.
First, can we extend the social connectedness approach beyond improving mental health and into promoting human flourishing? In other words, can social connectedness be used to increase empowerment, resilience and purpose? Answering this question is of particular importance for youth around the globe, who face extremely seriously challenges (climate change, overpopulation and technology disruption). Humanity needs them to feel empowered, resilient and with purpose to tackle these challenges.
Secondly, how can social connectedness be increased? Individual approaches to building connectedness tend to focus on changing individuals' behaviour (Twentyman & Zimering, 1979) and cognitions (Cacioppo, Cacioppo, & Boomsma, 2014). However, connectedness goes beyond the individuals; connectedness is a collective process. As such, collective interventions are better suited at promoting connectedness. And yet, despite their theoretical importance, very few of such collective interventions have been systematically studied (e.g., Haslam et al., 2016; e.g., Haslam et al., 2019).
This request for ideas will lead the revolution on the collective approach to connectedness and collective flourishing (i.e., empowerment, resilience and purpose) in youth. A series of high quality studies (i.e., experiments with randomized control; longitudinal studies) can be designed to examine the link between social connectedness and collective flourishing. These studies will provide the basis for designing randomized-control type interventions that will be tested in several countries. These, in turn will be improved upon and upscaled to different populations and countries. At the end of the 10 years, this idea has the potential to produce a practical and well-tested intervention that promotes connectedness and collective flourishing worldwide.

Five references:
https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2333
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210521
https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-3766
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.01.010
https://doi.org/10.3386/w23761

Five Collaborators:
Katherine J. Reynolds
Tegan Cruwys
Michael Platow
Jolanda Jetten
Alex Haslam