Connective Tissue:
The Framework
Reimagining the role of policy in regenerating and strengthening connection within American communities.
The decline and sorting of our civic life has left today’s Americans less connected to one another and their communities than at any point in the last century. Regenerating connection within communities will demand civic, cultural, and policy change, but this is an emergent area of policymaking, and government leaders often don’t know where to begin.
That’s why we created this framework: to provide policymakers with an organized, actionable starting point for connection-focused policymaking. With 150+ specific policy opportunities featured across 13 policy priorities, Connective Tissue provides both a holistic policy vision for regenerating connection within communities and tangible entry points for taking action. We invite you to read it (in part or in full), apply it to your particular context, and build on it further.
Explore the Framework
A mix of breadth, depth, and practicality to inspire policy action across sectors and levels of government.
With an experience as fundamental to being human as connection, and a setting as expansive as community, we needed to create a tangible way to think about organizing, devising, and implementing policy. We make the breadth of this framework accessible by structuring it into four complementary chapters, each including three to four related sections. But we also make it actionable: offering policy opportunities within each section, organizing them by the stakeholder group who can take action, and accompanying them with specific case studies and resources to inspire such action.
Chapters
Foundational Changes
What are the foundational changes necessary to prepare government to approach policymaking with a cross-cutting connection lens?
Community Institutions
What are the highest potential opportunities for institutional change to strengthen connection within communities?
Life Transitions
What are the most critical transition points throughout the life course where policy can help bolster connection?
Early Childhood & Parenting: Bolster social support for new parents and children, easing the transition to parenting and improving outcomes during life’s early years.
Adult Transition: Reimagine the adult transition to foster lifelong relationships across difference and habits of community participation.
Community Integration: Enhance local capacity to help all individuals—particularly veterans, immigrants, and the formerly incarcerated—integrate into new communities.
Retirement & Older Adults: Promote the overall and intergenerational connectedness of older adults—both during and after retirement—through housing, service, and education.
Enabling Conditions
What are the forces that operate beyond communities, but wield an outsized influence on how Americans experience connection within them?
Sections
Measures: Develop and adopt a set of indicators to measure the strength of civic opportunity, community participation, and individual and community connectedness.
Personnel: Align personnel to coordinate connection-related priorities across policy, implementation, and outreach.
Connection Lens: Repurpose relevant government policies, programs, and practices to foster connection within communities—and create the support structures to do so.
Housing & Neighborhoods: Activate the housing sector and neighborhoods to become platforms for participation, overall connection, and bridging social capital.
Civic Infrastructure & Associational Life: Reorient government and philanthropy toward regenerating and strengthening communities’ civic infrastructure and associational life.
Care & Education: Strengthen the connectedness of care and educational settings by inviting in more peer, community, and bridging forms of participation.
Work: Improve the stability and predictability of work, providing workers the agency to participate in community life and cultivate stronger connections outside of work.
Big Tech & Media: Reform the big tech and media ecosystem to enable—rather than compete with and hinder—community participation and connection.
Local News & Media: Revitalize local news and media ecosystems to be more community-embedded, community-driven, and participatory.
Get Involved
Connect
Schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with Sam to ask questions and learn more about the framework.
Collaborate
Partner with us to host events with policymakers, researchers, funders, and other relevant folks.
Contribute
Suggest policy opportunities, case studies, and resources to add to our living database.