GIMBHI's Q&A with Jackie Ourman, Founder of the Social Connection Collective
Jackie Ourman is the founder of the Social Connection Collective (SCC), a growing global community dedicated to combating the loneliness epidemic. A licensed mental health counselor and executive coach based in New York, she brings a deeply relational lens to her work, shaped by years in clinical practice at Values Aligned Therapy, an earlier career in HR within investment banking and equities, and leadership experience in the nonprofit sector. She is also a founding member of the AI Mental Health Collective and a trusted GIMBHI advisor. Jackie’s work sits at the intersection of clinical care, social health, and the rapidly evolving fields of AI and human connection.
You work at the intersection of AI, mental health, and social connection. Why is that intersection so important right now?
This is what I call the human connection paradox. We are building more tools for connection than at any point in history, and social disconnection is at an all-time high.
The scale of what’s already happening is hard to ignore. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly users. A February 2025 study from Sentio University found that ChatGPT may now be the largest mental health provider in the United States. According to Common Sense Media, 72% of teenagers have used AI companions. And OpenAI’s own data revealed that more than one million people discuss suicide with ChatGPT every week.
People are already turning to AI for emotional support, for processing difficult experiences and even for connection. That’s not inherently wrong. But it requires us to ask hard questions about what we’re building toward. Are these tools strengthening people’s capacity for real human connection, or are we creating off-ramps from it?
The clinical concern I keep coming back to is attachment. These tools are designed to feel responsive and attuned. Real attachment can form. But the product on the other end is not human. It can be shut down, paywalled, or simply pivoted away from the people relying on it. There also isn’t a full understanding of the capabilities of AI.
The goal isn’t to resist technology or innovation. It’s to make sure we are not building tools to replace human connection or to fill the gap of social disconnection, but tools that actually bring people back to other humans. When it comes to tools being built specifically for mental health, clinicians and researchers need to be in the room, with guardrails for safety. I am working to address these issues both clinically and at scale, and this work is part of what inspired me to start the Social Connection Collective.
How did the Social Connection Collective come to be, and what problem were you trying to solve?
The SCC exists because I believe that no one should be doing the work of ending loneliness alone.
I attended the launch of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Connection’s flagship report in July. I had been seeing the evidence of social disconnection up close every day in my clinical work. I wanted to learn more. The report named social disconnection as a global public health crisis. One in six people globally are affected by loneliness. It increases the risk of stroke by 32%, heart disease by 29%, and dementia by 50%, and costs billions annually in lost productivity and healthcare. What I had been sensing in my clinical work for years, the report put into numbers.
Towards the end, Vivek Murthy, who was presenting the report, had a direct call to action: we need more people doing this work.
The Zoom chat was buzzing with people who were energized and trying to connect with one another. Hundreds of people from around the world, all trying to reach each other at once, names and contact details scrolling by too fast to click on. So I dropped a spreadsheet into the chat. Within minutes, more than a hundred people had added their names.
Christian Altenius, who runs a thriving connectors community in Sweden, reached out shortly thereafter and said he had been looking for a way to bring this work to a global scale. We decided to team up, and we hosted our first global meetup in September. Practitioners, researchers, public health leaders, entrepreneurs, advocates, many of them meeting each other for the first time. Two officers from WHO attended as well and have since spoken at our last global meetup in January.
The feedback from both of our meetups have been overwhelmingly positive and consistent. Person after person said they had been feeling alone in this work. Maya Pieske joined shortly after as our global community lead, and together, the three of us have been building ever since.
Your mission is to “connect the connectors.” What does that mean in practice?
There have been people dedicated to addressing social disconnection for decades, building the evidence base, running community programs, advocating for policy change. The WHO Commission brought a new wave of energy and attention to that effort, and with it came a lot of people asking: how do I get involved, and who else is doing this?
The SCC exists to bring those people together. We are working to create a collaborative space where people can learn from one another, share ideas, and build relationships that deepen their impact and keep this work sustainable. Connecting the people who have been at this for years with the people just finding their way in, and making sure all of them have a community to support them.
You’ve built a community with over 40 ambassadors across more than 30 countries. What does that kind of global representation mean for the work?
Social disconnection is not one thing. The way it manifests is shaped by culture, history, community structure, age, gender, the population you’re working with. The pain is the common thread. The context varies.
What matters to me is that we’re not looking at social health through a single lens. Our ambassadors are embedded in communities across multiple continents, working with different populations, in different environments. One of the things I’ve found most interesting is how much physical infrastructure matters: how cities are designed, how communities are built, whether the environment creates conditions for connection or quietly works against it.
That diversity of perspective makes the work more grounded and meaningful.
The WHO Commission on Social Connection put loneliness on the map as a global health priority. What does that mean for the broader conversation around social health?
Kasley Killam says it best: social health is where mental health was fifteen years ago. Think about how far that conversation has come. That shift happened because people kept naming it, kept building around it, kept insisting it deserved to be taken seriously. We are at that same inflection point with social health right now.
The Commission’s PRIME framework (Policy, Research, Interventions, Measurement, and Engagement) gave the field a shared architecture for action, not just awareness. I believe it has the potential to elevate the conversation in a way that opens doors in government, corporate spaces, and healthcare that haven’t been open before.
The challenge now is translating that attention into durable change. That’s exactly where the SCC would like to have an impact.
There’s growing recognition that social health is also a major business opportunity. How do you think about that dimension?
The cost of social disconnection to employers is staggering: absenteeism, turnover, reduced productivity, increased healthcare utilization. Companies investing in social health now are going to be ahead of where this conversation lands in five years.
But the more interesting opportunity is structural. It’s not just about building products that address disconnection. It’s about rethinking how organizations, communities, and institutions are designed to support connection in the first place. That’s a much bigger conversation, and the people doing this work across the SCC and many other organizations are now positioned to help shape it.
We are at an early moment in a field being defined in real time. The frameworks, the metrics, and the solutions are still being built. There are extraordinary people in our community doing this work who can help make that happen.
What is the thing you think we’re most missing in the mental health conversation right now?
Social health. Full stop.
We talk about mental health more than we ever have. Better language, more tools, more awareness. And yet so many people are still overwhelmed, exhausted, and suffering.
Most people don’t walk into my office describing social disconnection. They describe burnout, anxiety, and a sense that something is off even when, on paper, it looks like everything should be ok. What sits underneath so much of it is disconnection from other people, from community, from a sense of being truly known.
We treat social health as something that supports mental health rather than something mental health and physical health actually depend on. It is not an add-on. It is infrastructure. Connection is both prevention and cure. Until we treat it that way, we will keep responding to distress without addressing some of the fundamental conditions that create it.
You came to this work through a career that spans mental health, HR in financial services, and the nonprofit sector. How does that range of experience shape your approach?
My career has taken a lot of different shapes, but looking back, the threads connect in ways I couldn’t have planned.
Years in HR within investment banking and equities gave me a direct understanding of high-pressure professional environments and the people inside them. That experience informs how I think about the opportunity for this work in corporate spaces, and I believe that opportunity is significant.
My clinical work keeps me grounded in what this looks like up close. I work with individuals and couples, and social disconnection shows up in both contexts in ways that are impossible to ignore. People are increasingly being asked to do what a village
used to do, whether that’s one person navigating life without enough support around them, or a couple or family carrying more than they were meant to carry alone. A big part of the work I do is helping people understand that the challenges they’re facing as a result of that are actually normal, and then we work together to build the connection and infrastructure to make life more manageable and meaningful.
My former work in nonprofit partnerships has given me a lens for building momentum, creating collaborations, and thinking about how to move an issue forward. What runs through all of my past experience is that when I see a problem, I look for ways to solve it at scale.
What do you want people to know about the Social Connection Collective and how to get involved?
We are a global community built around social health. The people who find their way into SCC are practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs, advocates, and leaders who are actively working on this issue or looking to get involved in a meaningful way. We believe in collaboration as a value, give generously, and see addressing social disconnection as both a moral imperative and a real opportunity to do something that matters.
If that’s you, we would love to have you in the room. We have monthly regional events, quarterly global meetups, and are beginning to define and collaborate on initiatives together. The energy and momentum in this space is real. Our next global meetup is on April 14th, and if you’re interested in learning more, you can join our private LinkedIn group for updates.
Additionally, if you are exploring ways to invest in or support social health, please reach out. This is a space where the right resources and partnerships can make a real difference.
Connect with Jackie:
LinkedIn / Website / Substack / Social Connection Collective
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