We’re seeing increasing attention paid to how communities can be designed to foster connection and help prevent loneliness, but as individuals, it can be hard to ‘get ahead of’ the issue,specially if we don’t know what being lonely is like. In some of our most recent research, people who’d never experienced loneliness were less likely to watch for signs of being lonely yet more confident in their ability to avoid becoming lonely, than people who had experienced it.

Last year, I took part in a workshop on the causes and processes behind loneliness, and left with a particular interest in how we at Re-engage could use a conceptual model of loneliness to create opportunities for people to think about it, whether or not loneliness was currently an issue for them.

Since then, we’ve developed an interactive session designed to translate the model into something more tangible and hands on, and in March 2026 we had our first opportunity to pilot it as the Campaign to End Loneliness roadshow kicked off in Edinburgh.

It can be tricky to identify loneliness risk factors in our own lives, especially those that stem from the way that our society or communities are organised. So, we translated each domain – from social or global conditions through our local communities right down to our own experiences and thoughts, feelings, and actions – into buckets of brightly coloured, differently sized balls and invited attendees to dig in and pick ‘n’ mix.

Then we launched the balls into an oversized funnel to see what happens when all those factors come together. If we have ample internal and/or external resources to manage them, they might travel around the funnel briefly and then flow through, but if we’re short of resources or support, the funnel is narrowed and the balls get stuck.

The goal is to help people think about loneliness risks and how they combine in a more personalised and hopefully meaningful way; I’m grateful to everyone in Edinburgh for taking part in something new and untested with such enthusiasm. It was great to hear that people found it a useful way to visualise something that can feel abstract and hard to pin down. 

The funnel and I will be travelling with the roadshow to Hastings (April), Blackpool (June), and Bristol (September), and we’ll keep tweaking things as we go in response to feedback and suggestions. We’ll also be helping the Campaign and others run sessions like this elsewhere.

Thank you to Derek Cockerton, the roadshow’s funder, for building the funnel and to members of the Campaign team for helping me put it together on site.