Extension's Role in Addressing Social Isolation.

The Building Resilient Inclusive Communities Program (BRIC) includes a focus on reducing social isolation and loneliness. It's a collaboration between CDC, DNPAO, and National Association for Chronic Disease Directors.  Funding flows through state health departments.It would be interesting to find out if any funded states collaborated with Extension.

https://chronicdisease.org/bric/

Such an important conversation! Social connection is a part of the definition of mental wellbeing, and is so critical for our work across Extension.  View a short video on the difference between mental illness and mental health and another about stress and isolation on the University of Minnesota Extension website.

Really important topic. We are looking at how we can "multisolve" this issue. How to engage older adults in our work and in the community (building social connections) while connecting them with critical community resources and even involving them in programs like Aging Mastery and or Powerful Tools for Caregivers, depending on what they need and are interested in. The more resources and tools in our toolbox, the better!

We often talk about mental health and extension's role in addressing mental ill health symptoms: substance use, addiction, other anti-social behaviors. We rarely consider our role in working on "root causes" or social-environmental determinants of mental health disparities or low/poor social-emotional well-being among subpopulations (e.g., diverse demographics-age, gender, race, ethnicity, rural, etc.). We also tend to miss opportunities to plan and work across sectors & systems to identify and collectively address social issues that impact the diversity of our constituents AND ourselves.

I do too, @Erin (Yelland) Martinez!

I have been thinking a lot lately about the ways that our engagement with older adults offer prevention of social isolation... which is really social connectedness.

Thanks for bringing this forward, @Adam T Hughes.

So jealous I wasn't a fly on the wall for this conversation! I think this is a critical population that we so often miss/overlook/under engage.