10 tips to help your project reduce loneliness

This paper brings together emerging findings from the existing evidence to offer practical help to Building Connections Fund grant holders and other projects working on reducing loneliness.

These tips focus on how services are delivered, rather than what they deliver. The aim is to help project planning and implementation so that they work more effectively to reduce loneliness.

The diversity of types of loneliness, types of interventions, target beneficiaries and locations are such that there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to fighting loneliness.

Here, we draw out promising factors, mechanisms and approaches that make existing interventions more likely to be effective. As some tips emphasise, approaches should be personalised and localised to tackle loneliness.

These tips should be taken as ideas to explore, rather than as a prescriptive checklist.