 Welcome to Pookie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, why does loneliness matter and how can we build connection, community and belonging? And I'm in conversation with Iona Lawrence. But I mostly work for myself because it gives me the chance to work with even more people than I've ever had the chance to work with before. So as my background, I've always built partnerships, coalitions and networks to achieve change on some really intractable issues. So I started in international development and worked at Save the Children for a number of years before then coming closer to home to work on the refugee crisis when I lived in Calais for six months working with an accompanied child refugees. And then came back to the UK to set up the legacy for Joe Cox, the MP who was killed in 2016. And through that work, we built networks and partnerships and coalitions around the things that she cared about most and one of the main things that we worked on was her interest in belief in the power of social connection to build better, safer, more compassionate communities and societies. And we campaigned through that for the Minister for Loneliness, who was appointed in 2017 and various other bits and pieces. And now most of my work is around how we strengthen the relationships and the connections that we have with each other in every aspect of our life to build a kind of better future for everyone. And in my opinion, it's relationships, the relationships we hold in all aspects of our lives that are one of the key things that we need to do as we look ahead to some of the big challenges we all have in common. Wow. I'm just going to digest that for a moment. So we're thinking about loneliness today so the episode question which is always only ever the jumping off point and we go wherever the conversation takes us but the jumping off point is why does loneliness matter and how can we build connection between community and belonging which seems to be like a really core theme through your work so don't know if you want to start jumping off there and then thinking I'd be really interested to hear a bit more about the J. Cox Foundation and you know how you came to be the person setting it up and and what you yeah what you've been doing them. Yeah, well I can start with I can start with that story so, and Joe and I were sort of friends through politics and through the charity sector. And she was a she was a good friend but not really close friend which I think is important because I think we set up her foundation her family asked me to set up her foundation in the months after her murder in 2016. She had the kind of the privilege and the honor really of working alongside her family and friends to work out where they wanted to make her legacy count. And so I was in kind of the in like interesting position of having a huge amount of goodwill you know in the months after Joe's in the weeks after Joe's murder. So the count is raised in a crowd thunder. Wow. Can you just before you go on just because we have people who will listen from all over the world just explain who Joe was. So Jo was a backbench member of Parliament. She'd only been an MP for about a year before she was killed and before that she'd been an aid worker for a couple of decades and in 2016 in June in the weeks running up to the Brexit referendum she was killed in her constituency in Northern England in Yorkshire by a man who disagreed with her on a number of things but namely Brexit and when he went to prison you know he went to prison not because he was experiencing any kind of psychotic episode he's been kind of he was a political extremist so it was an assassination and I think I don't know what you'll remember of that time Pookie but it really felt like it touched a nerve in like sort of the hearts and minds of people up and down the country so of course there were her two young children aged two and four who lost their mother at that stage and her family both in Yorkshire but also in London her in-laws in Reading who whose lives were turned inside out and upside down but that also there were literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of people up and down the country who then you know were writing letters to the family and to the foundation when we were set up expressing what her example had meant to them many of them hadn't known who she was she was not significant in any sort of big public profile although she had every intention of becoming a front bench minister when the time came but what she what she's perhaps most renowned for now is that in her maiden speech in the in the first speech she gave in the House of Commons she said that in Yorkshire in her constituency that is very diverse and has lots of different communities living side by side that the thing that she was often struck by as she's kind of grown up and lived in that area was that despite all the things that divide them that time and again she was reminded how much people have in common and that more in common has become something of a kind of kind of I don't know what's the word mantra I suppose for who she was and what she stood for yeah and I think that that is something I do remember from that time and from her word was that we felt like quite a divided nation with the whole Brexit thing but everyone came together regardless of your politics actually this was just wrong and I think that was something everyone agreed on that it was yeah horrific and and and wrong and it's it's fantastic that the work that you and and and colleagues have done to remember her in this way and I'm sure that's um well I don't know it's very difficult isn't it to say that something good came out of something awful because actually with much rather she was here and she was a front bench MP making a difference I'm sure but um yeah remarkable what you've what you've done so you said you had two million pounds in donations yeah well so about a month or so after she was killed her family realised that they wanted to set something up in her memory but one thing to know about Jo is she was like knee high to a grasshopper she was incredibly short and a bundle of energy and always sort of hatching plans and working out who she could pull together to fix some difficult issues and so what they wanted to do was was take that energy take her kind of you know her conviction around doing the thing that mattered with who was with whoever was needed in order to make the biggest difference and put that in a foundation and and so with this two million quid we also had the most unbelievable amount of goodwill so Barack Obama had called her called her family the day after she had been killed to sort of obvious condolences you know we had literally hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country writing letters and getting in touch we had all of her MP colleagues in Parliament and so her family sort of sat down with me and said what they were looking for was um a legacy that could build on all of that energy so it wasn't just about how do we take the two million pounds and make that kind of build her legacy but also how do we be invitational about kind of building a legacy for her that makes the most of and capitalises on all of this goodwill and does I think what I felt all the way through was a very joe thing to have done she did look at this absolute tragedy and she did sort of like taking a great big deep breath and being like we're going to make the best out of this and so I had the sort of challenge but also the kind of privilege of sitting behind the scenes behind all of that energy and trying to choreograph it into a plan that made sense but that also enabled everyone who wants to play a part to be able to play a part in building a legacy for her so the things that we picked up very quickly her colleagues in parliament um Rachel Reeves the seamer Kennedy who were on opposite sides of the kind of political parties came together and picked up on this loneliness commission that she had set up just before she was killed and they decided that they were going to use that as a way to do what Joe had wanted which was to build a kind of public and political profile around loneliness is an issue and that there's a whole story in that in and of itself and we perhaps can come back to that alongside that we you know worked with international development colleagues to create a fund for £10 million in her memory to go to sort of women's causes overseas and various other bits and pieces and there were sort of a whole bunch of things that we did and you'd only have ever seen her friends and family leave that work and then I ran this amazing tiny team behind the scenes doing all of the sort of you know organising that's essentially needed for all of that to make sense um and yeah it was it was extraordinary and it was part campaigning it was part grief work because everyone we were working with was sort of including myself like plow like pouring their grief and pouring their all of the emotions that we had in the sort of months after into making it count and that meant you know it was it was stressful and exhausting but it was also some of the I think the most powerful work I will ever be a part of and is something that I think collectively everyone the hundreds of us who played a really big role in building her legacy will look back forever and be like incredibly proud of you know what we were able to make happen and uh in a in a way that I think Joe would have uh yeah Joe did Joe would have probably giggled at lots of points there were yeah there were ridiculous moments where we were yeah maybe I should tell you the loneliness story because that's like why Joe cared about loneliness yeah I was going to say why did Joe care so much about loneliness so um there's sort of a various things so she grew up in Yorkshire and her her father was a um worked in a toothpaste factory I think although I might have got that wrong and mum worked in a school and her grandfather was a postman and she said she remembers walking around Batley which was or Batley and spent the constituency with her her grandfather the postman and and recognising that there were you know lots of people that he knew the name of then she goes off goes to Cambridge University and having come from a working class background to Cambridge she experienced extreme loneliness at Cambridge and she talked a lot about how you know she almost left university in fact I think she did leave for a while and then went back and she found it really really difficult um and uh then she went into international development and became an aid worker and then Joe's family in Yorkshire will say like they just lost her for a few years you know she was always on a plane somewhere and she'd come hurtling back in and then fly back out again but she always wanted to be the MP for her home constituency so when that came up in 2000 and must have been 14 to 15 um she took this decision that she wanted to kind of throw her hat in the ring and see if she could get the um and she pitched up back in her hometown and started knocking on doors as you do to campaign and was really struck by how knocking on lots of doors it wasn't just older people perhaps who you might imagine are the ones that want you to come in for a cup of tea and sit down have a chat there were lots of people who were really wanting to have a chat with her like lots of people who for whom this was one of the only social contacts if not the only connection they were having in a day and those might be carers they might be people with disabilities they might be yes lots of older people there's lots of people stereotypically imagine but actually there were she was touching on almost every aspect of the community that was experiencing a lack of social contact so when she arrived in parliament as an MP um she started talking to people um at like fellow MPs and saying you know was loneliness something that they'd seen in their constituencies and and what do they think could be done about it and she began to realise that there was this sort of what some people have called a hidden epidemic and I think we need to be careful about pathologising loneliness because that might not necessarily be particularly helpful but that certainly there was this unrecognised upswell of disconnection in all aspects of our lives that was bubbling up in lots of different ways but that meant that could quite quite simply be described as loneliness and that you know in some ways that's you know there's there are lots of routes to it right you can look at the way in which family life has changed fewer family meals more kind of sort of divided families or single parent families all of the like all of that kind of shifting structure there are workplaces that can um you know increasingly with anything from zero hours contracts to like uh moving or shift work you're not connecting in a workplace you can look at communities or you can look at faith groups and the fact fewer of those belong to faith groups than ever before trade unions and other memberships and then you've got layered on top of that social media and the kind of digital age like I think at the heart of that lies loneliness which is um the people who've studied it for years loneliness in itself is is the gap between the social connections you have and the social connections you want and when there is that gap that is the like the personal subjective feeling that you have and we know that the cost of it is humongous so uh Julianne Holt Lundstadt is has is one of the kind of leading academics on loneliness and she is fairly uh kind of famous now for having um uncovered that loneliness is as bad for our health as 15 cigarettes a day um and it uh sort of costs our economy 32 billion pounds a year um but also what it does to our sense of who we are and our relationships with others is perhaps the most corrosive thing I think that I'm perhaps most interested in it sort of cuts you out and cuts you off it robs you of empathy it leaves you without perspective I live on my own and I'm incredibly sociable and the last year I've got very up close and personal with how much perspective you are robbed of when you just don't have people to sense check things with and bounce ideas off and rationalize and you know give perspective to things um so if we come back to Jo she was on the cusp of basically doing what Jo did best when she was killed and that was pulling together 15 different charities children's charities older people's charities charities for people who work with disabilities lots of different charities to basically start having this bigger conversation what was going on that was leaving so many people feeling so cripplingly lonely and she was killed about a few just a few weeks before she was going to launch her commission and that's where her colleagues Rachel and um Seema picked up then long story short a year long campaign where we I didn't sort of all of the organizations that were involved told the story of why loneliness mattered and was important to the kind of issues or the people that they work with and at the end of it we published a report and called on the government to kind of show political leadership what could they do not to fix the loneliness problem no one wants a government to make friends for them but what can the government do to really set some of the agenda and the tone for this conversation in the country and that's why when in 2018 I think they announced that the minister for loneliness is being appointed the world's first minister for loneliness we were absolutely delighted because that is one of the things that the government can do is help set priorities and in them appointing a minister for loneliness and agreeing that it needed a strategy and proper money it was a real kind of moment of agenda setting not just in the country but actually around the world about what matters and what matters here is relationships and the power of relationships to keep us happy and healthy and yeah that's a very long way of telling you that story so what is the job of the minister for loneliness I get that it sends a really important political message to say we prioritized this enough to have a minister and there's a need for a strategy but what do you hope that or what has that minister achieved what do you hope that that that role will achieve in the future because that's it's a great milestone to have that role in place but what does it do yeah so um a number of things so the first is um this sort of narrative work which basically and that's sort of it's not done yet but it does you know when the government does something everyone else starts doing it too so the government does a good good job at continuing to convene people so like one of the one of the key things I'm personally super interested in is what is the role of the gathering places and bumping spaces in our communities which often come down to at least for me at the moment supermarkets right like me going to Sainsbury's and so how do we get Sainsbury's and the big retailers to prioritize this stuff government can help govern convene government can pull people in and start setting the big supermarkets down and saying what are you doing to make sure that your staff in the same way with the dementia agenda lots of people have focused on how we support dementia friendly places and spaces how do we support connection friendly or loneliness friendly spaces and spaces so the first is they can agenda certain convene the second is we know that lots of this lots of loneliness has touch points with policy so for instance in rural areas things like transport can be the difference between having absolutely no social contact and having some so what can the minister for loneliness do and what she does very well is reach out across government and try and encourage you know everyone from transport to health to education to make sure that they are thinking through across all of their policies how are they ensuring that loneliness or perhaps more importantly the power of social relationships is informing the decisions they're taking to ensure that the jigsaw puzzle essentially of our society that then becomes better connected is sort of really prioritized I think the real challenge we continue to have and and this is something that is only going to have been made more difficult by covid is that this stuff takes money and that loneliness continues to be a kind of part of it a set of issues which is seen in some circles is good to have not essential and I think what I'm really excited about having a minister for loneliness at this particular moment is is that I think if if anything one of the things that we've learned in the last year how important our relationships are I feel like every single person in the country in the last year has sat down at some point and been like oh wow I've either got too much or too little of like whatever I've got in my life and I think you know one in three adults have experienced loneliness so deep in the last year that they thought something would happen to them and no one would notice we know that children and young people are experiencing it more acutely than their older neighbors and with that comes I think this moment for us to realize that social relationships and meaningful social connection is a it's not good to have it's essential without that like so much falls apart you know our health our health suffers our community suffer our our kind of politics suffers and so a minister for loneliness in the next phase can make sure I hope and I'm confident that she's going to give it a good shot can make sure that in the rush to rebuild social connection is at the heart of the recovery how we rebuild communities and rebuilds and reopen our country in a way that encourages people to lean into one another to connect again is I think the biggest opportunity of our time but without it come some of the biggest challenges and that's what I think is on her agenda and how do we go about doing that you know leaning into social connection because I feel like I don't know you'll have I'm sure much more coherent thoughts on this than me but during this time of the pandemic there's a couple of things one is that we have learned to connect in different ways so in a way the world's got smaller and you know we can have this conversation despite the fact I assume we're hundreds of miles apart right now I don't know it doesn't matter but then on the other hand there is that that feeling of distance from people and I wonder about how as things begin to return how do we make sure that those those connections are established and happen in the way that you would hope they would I mean what does good social connection even look like how do we quantify it such a good question that there's so much debate over and there is no easy answer so if I take it piece by piece what does good social connection look like so one of the problems here we have here is that we like the desire to measure things can sometimes put people who think about loneliness very deeply it can come slightly put their backs up because to measure a relationship requires it to anyway we won't go down that rabbit hole but I personally think that all relationships whether they are the thick ties or the thin ties so thick ties are so Professor Rubin Dunbar is like the godfather of relationships at Oxford University and he says we need five meaningful relationships in our life in order to stay happy and healthy there's like five fruit and bench essentially and so those are like your nearest and dearest other people that you call up when you get you know your good news and your bad news they're the people that will scoop you up off the floor but also high five you when things have gone right and we've known that for quite a long time but also there's increasing increasing bodies of evidence around how the thinner ties the more seemingly superficial ones the you know conversations with the supermarket like checkout person the relationship you might have with your GP's receptionist or all of those kind of more superficial interactions are also incredibly important for giving us a sense of like belonging and and and and recognition and I think in the last year those those ties have become really prominent in our kind of public imagination whereas perhaps before this year people have been like oh you know it is you know my mum and my kids maybe that are the most important and my best friend I do think there's been a really interesting focus in the public eye over the last year about the role of all of those you know the neighbours on the streets the mutual aid all of the conversation about all of the bubbling up of social connection and renewed neighbourliness I think that speaks to this kind of the importance of the thinner ties as much as the thick ones and I think across both of those right I don't want the same relationship with my best friend as I do the supermarket checkout person but I want to come away from both of those interactions feeling like understood like I like like we've got something in common like a belong alongside them like perhaps it was a valuable connection you know and I feel as much like you know I can feel good and positive after a good conversation and you know with my GP as I can with a very good friend of mine and I think those emotional reactions are the way that we can quantify what a good relationship looks like and I then think that I'm I believe that relationships should be the first principle how many times did you say well has someone said to you or if you said to someone oh you know it was amazing because you know that doctor or that person really went the extra mile they did the thing that was like made me feel good I believe that relationships shouldn't be the extra mile I reckon we should be designing them into everything because if we've got a good relationship with someone really important whether it's a teacher or a or a GP or an employer that then creates the conditions for the other outcomes you want from that relationship so you don't want to wait until you know your doctor's missed a very important health change you want to have a good enough relationship not a deep and meaningful one but an open and honest and understanding enough one that you don't something doesn't have to go wrong in order for them to step forward and so I'm thinking increasingly about how we that like demonstrate the value of relationships so they become the first mile not the extra one so that you don't you don't have to be surprised when any one of these important people in your life you feel like you've kind of got a good relationship with them so okay that makes that makes sense how does that happen how do we make that happen very interesting that I don't have the answer to yet but I've got some hunches so hey there's there's no silver bullet right like I'm all of the conversations that I've listened to that you have you're very good at leaning into the complex stuff right you know they're like funny thing that's got the easy answer this is the joy of having an autistic person doing just right in there um uh so yeah I think there are a number of things number one C. McKenna Dee and Rachel Reeves when they ran the Joe Copson in this commission had these funny this thing they came up with this campaign called happy to chat and it's you know a silly little mechanism really but it did speak to something so they had these badges that they were and it said happy to chat on and that was their way of saying we need to be just a tiny bit dialed towards wanting to chat in a way that everything in our society pushes us away from that right now um they're they're convinced that there's a mindset shift that there is um we don't all have to want to be best friends right one of the questions actually that came up on Twitter was like what does it look like for introverts and extroverts and like we all have a different appetite for social connection not everyone should want to talk as much as I want to talk um but that like we could all do well to have a slightly more open mindset towards one another and so that might be uh yeah and doesn't mean need to be all the time but there's there is a mindset shift um second of all there's a there's a there is there are policies so um if we think about the Covid recovery I'm really interested and excited about all of the um like expert opinion that's going into conversations around social infrastructure which is essentially a kind of jargony way of saying the places and spaces that aren't your home or your workplace that have largely really suffered over the last decade or two so whether that's you know community centres or youth centres or you know all of the kind of uh space spaces all those sorts of places what but they're actually really important Eric Kleinberg a brilliant man who wrote a book called Palaces for the People is just obsessed with social infrastructure and that those places like that that stuff's not going to happen that needs big government investment and it needs big money but it also needs a local decision making so um I am kind of really excited about what could happen if if you know there was a um a big kind of uplift in the amount of kind of funding and time that's given to reinvesting in the social places in communities and then there's you know elements of uh you know transport as I said and health and people talk a lot about what has been learned during the pandemic about the the relationship between communities and local authorities that there's always been this tension that local authorities don't really trust communities to lead things and that you know they've got all the answers and that's this quite big chasm and there are too many checklists and too much red tape and all the rest of it and that covid has really challenged that because what we've seen in everything from the mutual aid to the kind of upsurge in like neighborliness and support is that um a like a kind of bottom up kind of organizing has really played a really important role in helping people cope during this time but that also that has challenged local authorities to work with communities in a more reciprocal way that has stripped in places some of the red tape out and some of the kind of you know oh you can't do that because if you knock tick this box whatever into something that's more much more reciprocal and I think that kind of culture shift it feels very nebulous and a bit like oh what does that really mean but I do think that could push us towards a world where um uh decisions are being taken in like in partnership with or in communities that foster people to work together and much more than than we've been able to see for for some time um um I don't know what do you think the answer to that question is like if you are um if you yeah if you're kind of sold with this idea that we need like to dedicate lots of time effort and energy to relationships where would you put your money well I I always I don't know I think virtually everything I ever think about and talk about and teach about seems to always come back to listening um and learning to really hear each other and really see each other and uh building connection in that way um and yeah a lot of what you're saying you're I tend to think from the bottom up so from little children making relationships one to one to one uh whereas yeah you're thinking on a much bigger grander kind of policy scale but I'm not sure there's not kind of room for for both there but I one thing I find myself wondering about a little bit because I'm always thinking about children and young people in particular is around the quality versus the quantity and how do we help people to find those individuals so you talked about how you need those those five people um in your life and I am someone who increasingly you know within my sector wherever I go kind of people know who I am but it doesn't mean that I don't feel lonely um and it's one of things Natasha Devon who's another mental health campaigner and I uh share she's one of the people that if things are difficult I reach out to and vice versa because we're both people who know a lot of people but can feel quite lonely sometimes in our work um and I'm yeah I think it's interesting thinking what yeah what what do good relationships look like and how do yeah how do we build them um and what other can what what are the um so I think I think the thing I'm interested when it comes to policy is like I think that a lot uh like a lot can be helped by context you know um if we think about you know the children question like how we're supporting our like our young people to um be equipped with all of the things that you're much more eloquent on than I am but around sort of an understanding of their emotions and their relationships and and what good looks like for all of that from the earliest age we're creating the conditions for them to be able to grow up and take healthy choices about how they like kind of build and hold and maintain relationships in that adult life but um I do agree with you that like fundamentally and we go back to the thing I said earlier which is that like we don't want the government to make friends for us we want to be able to do that ourselves and so I think the the minister for loneliness should never be a significant part of you know everyone's everyday life necessarily because um that feels a bit forced what we want is for the for the backdrops and the conditions of the lives and the communities and the worlds that we live in to encourage us to connect well with one another and as you say be able to hold the thicker ties and the thinner ties with one another well and I think the the other important component there is across perceived lines of difference as well and and a lot about the way that we live now is siloing us away from one another away from people who are different to us maybe that's different classes different races and so many different ways we can read that and it's not being helped by social media of course and and the political context is both fanning it and also kind of underpinning it and and I think one of the things that we are seeing increasingly coming out of covid is that um a like we need good relationships that are thick thin but that also bridge across perceived lines of difference so um this all of the statistics for instance around relationships that are held between different generations but outside of the family so you're likely to you know have a good relationship with your grandparents if there's like if you if you know them but the chances of you knowing someone of a of a different generation outside of your family is now smaller than it's ever been before and if we look at the way that that then is perhaps reflected in some of the you know the stories and the narratives and the and the stereotypes that are held around you know older and younger people and a lot of the blame and the kind of othering language that can be used in political and cultural narratives that speaks to um kind of a lack of understanding across lines of difference and if we come back to joe joe believes not that relationships are the only or the most important thing that are needed but in knowing people you're much more likely to be able to put yourself in their shoes have empathy put them in perspective and take you know the good bits and the bad bits that we all have in the round but that the more siloed we live the easier it is to just assume that all old people are like this or all people like that are like that and and with that comes a very dangerous like and further disconnecting kind of context um i'm just rambling now i can't remember how i got to this oh you asked you were talking about quality right yeah but we're hearing you talk i'm just wondering as well now though what are the kind of kind of common barriers to connection because you know you said right towards the beginning about how we might assume that loneliness only affects old people for example but i'm assuming that although that's not the case and that we might see loneliness at every age and stage but there's a reason for that stereotype and that perhaps there are more percentage of older people who might feel alone and lonely but i wonder what might be so a is age a common sort of barrier to connection and then what might be other kind of barriers to connection because i think about it from the point of view if you know we had that question around introversion and extroversion and i think that people like myself who are autistic and particularly as we come out of the pandemic and we've lost all our social skills how you build connection then and whether there are other things like if you're transplanted into a different culture than you're where you grew up for example if that makes it hard i just wonder if there are common themes there that you've uh yeah are there common themes that you're aware of are there things we can do to overcome these barriers um so there are lots of different ways of talking about this i think um the way that i look at barriers are there are barriers that are around our own individual need for and confidence and capacity around connecting with others and that's different for each one of us but at our core like humans are social so like you know though obviously everyone needs different and looks for different things in the relationships they hold but we are designed to be together we are designed to live alongside each other and connect and from that we will build meaning and purpose in our lives so um that means that i believe i have a hopeful view of human nature which is that if that's our starting point even though all of us have a different appetite for it like um we come into this world wanting to connect well with others um uh and that like each of us should be given the support and the encouragement and a lot of this and you'll be the expert at this right all of the attachment stuff around like how we learn how to relate and be loved and love in our very early years then form the backdrop to like the relationships we hold as we get older um but like a lot all of that is sort of from from the inside out so like that that's and and the the barriers that can exist there are the you know barriers where we you know um don't learn good like kind of relationship practice when we're young because of the relationships we hold from a very young age and all those sorts of things and then obviously things like trauma and grief you know we're all just you know bundles of you know messy relationship you know experiences and that will just show up in the way you relate to people across all of your life and those yeah so those are the barriers that can exist or some of the challenges and opportunities that can exist when we think about ourselves out and then there are barriers around the the context we work in right so the the spaces we move in can either promote or disencourage or dissuade us from connecting well so you know we've all been we've all been in a context I'm um writing a blog at the moment about uh about a bunch of things that I'm thinking about and the story I'm using at the beginning is the story of Jackie Weaver you know the politician who's listening overseas Jackie Weaver is a local councillor local politician in the UK who went viral in February this year because she was basically shouted at over Zoom by a whole load of fellow councillors and for me that was because they hadn't taken the time to build the relationships that could have meant this disagreement was perfectly doable but she works in you know she was operating in politics and politics is is known for basically not fostering good relationships that then make conflict more straightforward and that kind of is showing up a lot in the way that we see interactions there so the the other set of barriers are like how are we responding to the context we're operating in and is that context encouraging us to connect well and build the right sort of relationships for that context and um so yeah like I suppose a very simplistic way of me thinking about the barriers would be from us out and then the context around us and how we interact with it but I'd be interested to hear how you would answer that question how do you see um yeah the barriers to connecting well in all the kind of different ways that that means for the kind of work that you do I think yeah it's a big question isn't it I think I often think about it within the context of um environments so uh we often think about how do we enable children um or staff to feel a sense of kind of belonging and connection within their school environment in particular and that's been a particularly interesting question this year for children who have not had the appropriate and normal transition into school um either who've started for the first time or they've moved to a new school uh this year um and also for staff who perhaps are working with colleagues who they they hadn't had the chance to meet or get to know and they've had very little face to face time um and one of the things we thought about as schools went back recently in England was about how we create that sense of community again and we thought really carefully about that and actually a lot of that has felt like we've had to do things that almost feel a little bit contrived um and think about how we create sort of shared sense of purpose and goals and sort of come together doing quite sort of riverless things but with a really deep purpose and I think you've um the great get-together stuff is one of your things right so maybe you might speak to that a little bit but I think sometimes it's about finding ways to bring people together that might feel a little bit weird at first but in the hope that something sparks I suppose yeah because that's the other side of human nature right so like I do have this like very hopeful view of human nature but also let's be honest most most human interaction particularly at the kind of superficial end can often be incredibly awkward and um I worked yeah the great get-together but also there are just hundreds of brilliant different ways that people are basically creating you don't just bring two people together and they like spontaneously combust into some sort of meaningful connection particularly not if you're British right so we need so we need we need the the thing that is the thing that we do whilst we let the relationship grow and that that might be the you know at a superficial level like on the superficial connection side of things the the shopping that's being put through the checkout till or it's the meal that you're eating at the great get-together which is as you say a nationwide community picnic that brings neighbours together for a day every June and to sort of hang out and have fun or a brilliant organisation that I do a lot of work with called the Cares family who bring together older and younger people in big cities where you've got like those kind of two generations living side by side but absolutely no interaction happening and the Cares family organised dance parties and pub quizzes and like treasure hunts basically to burst people's bubbles and give people an excuse to reach out but you know you have to have the thing that you do whilst whilst you like kind of suss each other out and build that relationship and without that it can feel as you say I would it's just it's just awkward but as you do that I think yeah a finding things that feel fun and natural and and like one of the keys for this is making often that like if you want people to genuinely connect it's about finding something that they both need to learn together so there's this brilliant organisation in East London called Xenia who bring together women who perhaps don't speak such good English because they've recently arrived from a different country together with people women who do speak very good English and again they'd otherwise never meet and they meet every Saturday and they talk about lots of different words and lots of different languages and it's not like English as foreign language in the traditional sense but it's just a way for people to connect around the thing but that they're both learning right so everyone's learning languages together in the same way that everyone's eating food together or the great get-together you need to create you need to create a kind of a flat or kind of reciprocal context for people to connect well if if there's this clear power dynamic where someone is just here to bestow their expertise on someone else that's not this that's a useful relationship but it's not the sort of relationship that I'm super interested that's not the sort of relationship that fixes the like the the loneliness problem and the loneliness thing is created by giving people like something to do that then fosters a sense that they have something in common and there's a man called Johann Hari who wrote a book called Lost Connections which he might have come across who will make he makes this point very well about how loneliness isn't really the the lack of like other people it's the lack of having something meaningful in common with other people that then fosters a sense of belonging I think sometimes you can feel most lonely when you are surrounded by people that you don't connect with actually can't you and I and I think you know in in hearing you speak there I think one of the things that is is massively underrated or not not pushed enough really is hobbies I think hobbies are as an adult who doesn't always find it easy to connect with people when I look at my life as an adult now I was a late comer to hobbies I've always been very purposeful and most of my relationships have come through my work but in recent years relationships that have really mattered to me have come through climbing and singing which are two newer things in my life but when you do things alongside each other and again with you know that sense of purpose and learning from one another as well I think it can it can foster really brilliant friendships but it's hard and I think maybe we forget that making friends isn't necessarily easy and as you say it can be awkward at the beginning and yeah sometimes we need to just maybe be be a bit brave and and push through that and recognize that it's hard for the other person as well as for us I have a friend who um the other day said I've I've met someone and I really want to be friends with them they've met in a kind of context which wasn't a friend sort of making context but she'd identified she said I think I need to be brave and reach out because I think we could be friends and and and actually it's so funny because she did do that I said go on just do it what's the worst that can happen and she did and it seemed that this other lady was feeling exactly the same thing and I think we so often find that but we often wouldn't have had the conversation and would have just walked away and that connection is lost I think we have to be brave yeah I completely agree I think there are two things that I was thinking about there one on that late latter point which is around vulnerability which is you know can can be in some ways a bit of a buzzword but um I do think there's something in being prepared being prepared to look a bit foolish yeah um that is important in the game of relationships you know uh you know particularly when you're thinking about those top five like my top five have seen me at my absolute best and my absolute worst and you know in order to get there we need to admit and and be ready to to be like our full messy like selves and that come that needs vulnerability and so much of the context that we currently live in whether it's you know cancel culture or you know fast news or social media all of that context is toughening us up it's requiring us to not want to be that kind of messiness that kind of vulnerability that whole self that we are and I think yeah there's a there is something around like how do we how do we usher in more space for us to be as messy as we really are because like you know let's be honest humans are just one great big mess I think and second of all like you're talking about hobbies made me think about how like you know I don't believe that we want to look backwards um in a kind of rose tinted spectacle way at all because there's lots about the way that society and communities have been structured in the past that is very good that it's in the past but that some of the stuff you're talking about the kind of doing things with other people in a kind of ritualized way um was handed to us by a set of institutions and social structures whether they were membership organizations trade unions faith groups all of that kind of infrastructure that used to just stick us together with that ebbing away as you say you've gone and found those hobbies right you might have like been introduced to him by a couple of friends but it's not like you know you it was kind of handed to you on a plate you have to carve it out yourself and that's not necessarily a bad thing but at scale what does that mean because also I don't believe that those big institutions and the big those big gatherings of people in the kind of big membership sense are good just because they give us things to do they also make us feel part of something bigger than ourselves and one of the really interesting things about the great get together was in 2017 on the first anniversary of joe's murder when allegedly in partnership with this amazing organization called the big lunch nine million people came together in their communities on a single day and basically had lunch parties of and picnics and get-togethers of less than a hundred people mostly often less than 20 and when we did the evaluation of that people said it was so nice to spend time with our neighbors we'd look like it was the thing we'd always meant to get around to but we'd never quite got around to it but the other really valuable thing was opening the newspaper the next day and being like oh my gosh we're about something massive that's really cool and I think that speaks to something that we've lost from not being organized in those bigger groups now which is that sense of like bit like larger us there's a friend of mine called Alex Evans talks about and I think that's it I don't have an answer to it but that's a really big question like what are the big stories we tell ourselves about how why how we come together and why we matter and what the things are that we have in common not to paper over the cracks or to to undo like like the kind of the brilliant vibrance and diversity of us all but that hang us together enough that we feel like we've got common stories and we've got a shared agenda and that like that that well we just know that's really important we just don't have the answers to how we find it in the future big questions what's um what's next for you like is loneliness the thing for always for you like did you always imagine loneliness would be the thing and it's the thing or yeah what's next oh gosh I don't know if I have got answer to that um well I said at the beginning I I I work for myself not because I actually enjoy working for myself at all but because it enables me to work across so many different people so I sort of have 10 11 12 projects on at the go anyone time and they stretch across sectors they stretch us across scales you know some of my stuff is like hyperlocal and some of it is really big and national international and I love I love being able to weave together um that kind of work in a way that feels um like I'm being able to do something that yeah is like as big as loneliness requires us to think um I yeah in that in the long run I think um yeah like strong social connection and and the power of like relationships to um kind of pull us together and heal us and create a better future for everyone is exactly where I want to focus by energy but as Jo said I believe like loneliness is everyone's business so I'm open to playing a part in that work alongside all of the other brilliant people that I do this work with in pretty much any setting you know as I've alluded to I'm as interested in how this agenda can be furthered by the UK's biggest supermarkets as it can by government ministers as it can by every single person in the lives they lead each day they out and so I um I suppose interested in anything that gives me the ability to do it in any of those settings um I'm yeah what's the answer to that question for you what's um yeah where would I mean I suppose both for you but also for the loneliness agenda I think I I I think an interesting question is what each person can do differently um so I the thing is I and that's it I think we come at this and everything from almost opposite ends but with a common aim in mind in that uh you're looking at changing political agendas and I found I very quickly tired of trying to do that so I've done a bit of that but I found those places deeply uncomfortable and I find it much easier to change the way that thousands of people do things every day rather than what one person sitting up here believes um so I guess I find myself always thinking what's this thing that someone can do differently tomorrow as a result of something I teach or tell today um and and I think that with loneliness in particular that feels like something we can all do right we can all reach out to the neighbour in the way that perhaps we did in the depths of lockdown one maybe we just think about those connections again and we reach out or we pick up the phone or we write a letter yeah I can agree with you more and and the um the signs on that are pretty good so um the data says not that I love data but I do like data um who doesn't love data data says you know uh like millions of us reached out in a way that we hadn't before like of course all like lots of the people who and you know the stalwarts of community stuff day and day out they would they were also doing the kind of phone calling and the medicine collecting all that rest of it but also millions of people did it for the first time in this and um you know I am the hopeful person so uh I was sort of all the ways we last year thinking you know this is great this is really exciting people are like you know creating new neural pathways where they're kind of learning new behaviours and and you know the the skeptics amongst us are saying oh you know that will never stick that will never stay but an organisation inspired by Joe called More in Common that does a lot of work on um the kind of understanding people's perceptions across signs of difference um have uncovered that uh some lots of that behaviour is sticking and I think um I think that last count there was about um like 20% increase on the numbers of people who feel like they are they feel connected to their community and they feel like they have an active stake and they can do things to improve their local community and that's that's huge like if we can hold on to even some of that that's massive and I think um the role that uh some of the kind of leading lights of the last year have played in encouraging us to do that will continue to be important so you know the wonderful captain Tom who you know on one hand he was just raising money but on the other hand he was saying there's something you can do about this it's like you can like you know there's a really big problem but that each of us has a part to play and he before he died done a lot of work in the final year on loneliness and the same with I think with Marcus Rashford and what he uh called on local businesses to do and as they all swung into action they were reaching out in their communities and connecting with people who you know at least in my local area when I spoke to the the corner shop about the what what what they were doing for the um in against by Marcus Rashford they'd not done it before because they didn't know they were like oh we just never thought about it but then he showed us how and so we reached out to the local school and now we're playing a role and and that the heart of it is about a relationship the the building relationships across a line of difference and understanding through that where the where they can play a role and what what what can come out of that and then they're swinging into action so um I think yeah like the the role and of those kind of I suppose those those people that can show us what's possible and that can inspire each of us to play a small part is like is essential um so yeah I agree with you it does it does take every single one of us and that that's what fixes that that's what fixes this problem not governments government can create the context but you know we're all our own free agents and we will connect as we want to connect in the years ahead so um yeah I agree with you it's everything I'm wondering about setting a challenge for people who are listening or watching uh this so the reason we're speaking is because my good friend Joe another Joe Joe Heyman uh introduced us so Joe's one of my best friend he'd be one of my five uh and uh he uh said we would get on so he introduced us so that we could talk on the podcast and I do a lot of that introducing people often in a work context but I'll often have I've I'm blessed with a really brilliant network and I'll often think um of connections and just have a feeling that a couple of people will have synergy I like to think of myself as like the silver black of the mental health world but I wonder if people listening could just think about that in their like personal lives maybe and just think who could they connect where could they forge a connection between two people who might not have met before um because you never know when the magic might happen there so I reckon that's a challenge we should put out there everyone's yeah I think so and the other one I I like but again this is definitely not for everyone um but the conversations that you wouldn't have had if you didn't set out to do them so this uh friend of mine called Janice and uh is interested in um you know talking to strangers essentially um and not in a way that's intrusive or you know it requires like you know you not to want to like force yourself on other people but you know the conversations that bust up so checking counters or whatever it is um those conversations I also think are an interesting kind of an interesting test and sometimes I do uh you know talk to other people and then we set ourselves tests and it's it's always interesting like the you know if you then check back in again who who people did meet and where they did find uh even just fleeting moments of connection that they wouldn't otherwise have by just saying like today I'm going to maybe have one conversation that I wasn't like you know that I wouldn't otherwise have had if I hadn't put my mind to it so make connections with people around you yeah as those opportunities arise but as I say I have to be very careful about this because I'm an extreme extrovert so like I just I I I don't want to say that that's something that everyone will find value in because I speak very much from my perspective not from other people yeah I have to say the thought of doing that like makes me want to vomit but although that that's an interesting thing so in a work context I do it all the time when I've got that you know professional face on but then I'm the person who will go and speak on a stage to 500 people and then literally go and hide in the toilets rather than have to have conversations in the break because it becomes much but we're all different um what um what what thought would you like to to kind of close with I'm spending a lot of my time thinking about um this transition we're going through we talked about your daughters and the transition they're doing back into school and how difficult that is and I think with transitions we have we have a chance to decide what we take forward and what we leave behind and and you know most of us are just spending lots of our time trying to like muddle through day to day and you know keep food on the table and grooves over our head and children happy so this stuff doesn't have to be big but I am thinking a lot about what is the thing that I want to take forward from the last year which has had some really deep lows for me personally but also some sort of moments of like reflection and resolution and what do I want to set intentions about as I take forward as I look forward and what do I want to leave behind and I'm thinking a lot about that with my relationships and I think you know there's no single answer for everyone but I do think as I said we have all had to sit back and reflect on the relationships we have and the and the way we relate to others in the last year and that as we look forward I think I like hope that with that with that knowledge and that reflection we're choosing to take forward the best of our relationships and the best of intentions around our relationships leaving behind and you know the more isolating lonely and disconnecting elements of relationships in the past because as we look to the future it's in each other that we're going to find the safety and the security and the belonging and the kind of the the hope that we need in order to kind of whether what will undoubtedly continue to be quite a scary and uncertain future.