Take Part in WHO’s Social Connection Film Series
Featured Belonging Organization 3
Dear City Person,
In this free weekly newsletter, I have one post per month feature the work of an organization that addresses issues related to belonging and opportunities for readers to get involved. I was initially planning on writing about a few peer respite programs as I had mentioned to you toward the end of my post last week. But last night I saw an announcement of an opportunity to get involved in a project lead by the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Social Connection. This opportunity will close by May 31, 2024 so I did not want you to miss out on it in case you are interested in taking part.
I will postpone my post about peer respite programs for next month’s featured belonging organization.
Some housekeeping before I share more…
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About the Commission
The WHO Commission for Social Connection was launched this year in 2024 to prioritize loneliness and social isolation as global public health concerns. I encourage you to browse their website by clicking here to learn more about why they see these issues as priorities and to also check out my earlier posts in my newsletter if you have not already. I further recommend subscribing to the Commission to stay up to date on their initiatives and events.
The Commission is in the process of analyzing data they have gathered on systemic and individual solutions to tackle loneliness and social isolation. They hope that this analysis will help them create a proposal about ways leaders and community members can improve community social connection.
Among the many types of data being included in WHO’s analysis are people’s lived experiences with loneliness and social isolation which are being documented through a film series they have launched called the Social Connection Series. You can learn more about the film series and watch the current uploaded videos by clicking here and scrolling down to the heading “The Social Connection Series: lived experiences of people around the world through film.”
A question for readers before I continue, feel free to reply privately over email or leave a public comment on Substack…
What most caught your attention in watching one or more of the Social Connection Series videos? How come those parts caught your attention the most?
Opportunity to Get Involved
The Commission is still open to having more people submit their stories for consideration to be included in their film series. While everyone’s story will be considered, they will be prioritizing the stories of those who have marginalized experiences and identities such as migrants and people experiencing disabilities among others. The deadline to submit your story for potential consideration for the film series is on May 31, 2024. Click here for details on how you can submit your story. Even if your story gets declined, you may still possibly be invited to take part in a panel about social connection as detailed in the submission link I have shared.
I highly encourage you or anyone you know to participate and not to downplay the value your story can have. I have noticed that people who are not involved in the social sciences are unaware about storytelling as a valid form of research. They tend to take quantitative data (i.e. data that involves numbers) more seriously and dismiss qualitative data that include people’s subjective experiences and perspectives. They may see storytelling as “wishy-washy” and “not objective” or “serious.”
But both quantitative and qualitative data are important. They can provide valuable insights for researchers from different perspectives which can help them come up with solutions that are better tailored to people’s day to day lives. Sometimes collecting stories can help researchers come up with future research questions, and thus the potential for developing more solutions, that they may have not previously considered. Your story may thus offer an important insight especially when considered alongside other people’s stories and other types of quantitative and qualitative data that they have so far collected.
My post last week, which you can read by clicking here, featured a monthly belonging practice called collective documents as done within the context of narrative therapy and narrative community work. It was thus a lovely coincidence to see WHO’s announcement in my email inbox this week as their film project is an example of a collective document even though it is being done outside the context of narrative therapy/community work.
In next week’s newsletter, I will be featuring a reader’s offering as I tend to do at the end of each month. For this particular one, I will be reflecting on a blog post about connecting with nature that I deeply resonated with by artist Beth Adoette who is one of my readers.
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
What if you could spend a single day being completely invisible? How would you spend that day?
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.