One of the clearest lessons from Connected Fox Valley is that connection cannot be built for communities without being built with them. Residents, grassroots leaders, and people with lived experience hold critical knowledge about what fosters belonging and what creates barriers. When that knowledge is overlooked, even well-intentioned efforts can miss the mark.

Moving forward, community leadership must be embedded at every stage of this work, from planning and design to implementation and evaluation. This includes compensating residents for their time and expertise, partnering with trusted community-based organizations, and creating multiple pathways for participation beyond traditional advisory roles. Listening sessions, neighborhood networks, cultural organizations, and peer-led groups all play an essential role in shaping solutions that are locally relevant and culturally responsive.

Importantly, leadership must extend beyond formal systems. Many of the strongest protective factors identified across the region are informal, including neighbors looking out for one another, faith and cultural communities, recovery networks, and shared spaces where people gather organically. Strengthening social connection means recognizing, supporting, and scaling these assets, not replacing them.

Community partners repeatedly expressed concern about fragmented efforts, short-term funding cycles, and the pressure to constantly launch new initiatives without adequate time to learn, adapt, or sustain what works. Building social connection is long-term work, and it requires a shift from one-off projects to coordinated, aligned strategies.

Sustainability begins with alignment. Connected Fox Valley can offer a shared framework (with shared understanding and shared values) that helps organizations, funders, and public systems see how their work fits into a broader landscape. Rather than duplicating efforts, partners can build on existing assets, coordinate outreach, and align goals across sectors such as health, education, transportation, housing, and civic life.

Concrete steps toward sustainability include integrating social connection into organizational missions and strategic plans, embedding connection metrics into existing data systems, and pursuing braided funding that supports cross-sector collaboration. Shared tools, such as the this website and the the Strategy Hub, can support transparency, reduce redundancy, and help partners learn from one another.

Ultimately, sustaining this work will require a cultural shift toward shared ownership and long-term commitment. Social connection is not the responsibility of any single organization or sector. It is a collective condition that must be nurtured over time through trust, coordination, and a willingness to work differently together.

As Connected Fox Valley advances, policy and systems conditions will be increasingly examined as foundational influences on social connection and belonging. Zoning and land-use decisions, funding mechanisms, transportation and housing policies, workplace practices, and eligibility rules all shape who can access community spaces, services, and opportunities to build relationships. Advisory Group discussions have underscored that these policies are often developed in isolation, without fully accounting for their combined impact on equity, participation, and social connection.

To address this gap, Connected Fox Valley will form a Policy and Systems Change Work Group to bring together leaders from public health, local government, planning, advocacy, and community-based organizations to identify policy levers that can strengthen social connectedness across systems. The work group will focus on building shared language, integrating social connection considerations into planning and decision-making processes, and identifying opportunities for alignment across jurisdictions and sectors. Over time, this effort is intended to help embed social connection as a durable, measurable priority within the region’s policy and systems landscape.

Across Connected Fox Valley engagement efforts, mutual aid emerged as both a common theme and a clear expression of community priorities around basic needs. Residents and community partners repeatedly shared that unmet needs -such as food insecurity, housing instability, transportation gaps, childcare challenges, and access to essential supplies – create immediate and compounding barriers to social connection. When people are focused on meeting day-to-day survival needs, opportunities for belonging, trust-building, and participation in community life are often out of reach. These insights reinforced that addressing basic needs is not separate from social connectedness, but foundational to it.

Listening sessions also surfaced a strong belief that mutual aid functions as an upstream prevention strategy. Participants described how neighbor-to-neighbor support, informal resource sharing, and community-led response networks often prevent crises from escalating and reduce reliance on emergency or high-cost systems. At the same time, residents and organizers named real challenges: mutual aid efforts are frequently under-resourced, difficult to sustain, and poorly integrated with formal systems of care. Advisory Group members identified an opportunity to better understand how mutual aid can complement traditional services while preserving its core values of dignity, reciprocity, and community leadership.

This work group will bring together residents, grassroots organizers, community-based organizations, faith communities, and system partners to explore how mutual aid can be supported and strengthened across the tri-county region. The work group will focus on mapping existing efforts, identifying shared principles, reducing barriers to coordination, and clarifying how mutual aid fits within a broader continuum of basic needs support and prevention. Over time, this work is intended to elevate mutual aid as both a practical response to urgent needs and a long-term investment in resilience, trust, and social connection.

Throughout the Connected Fox Valley process, partners consistently emphasized the gap between identifying social needs and having clear, trusted pathways to community-based supports that address them. Healthcare providers, social service organizations, and community leaders described how loneliness, isolation, and unmet basic needs frequently show up in clinical and service settings – but are not easily addressed through traditional medical or programmatic interventions alone. These conversations reinforced growing interest in social prescribing as a promising approach to bridge systems and connect people to non-clinical supports that strengthen belonging, purpose, and everyday social connection.

Social prescribing is an emerging practice that enables trusted providers – such as healthcare professionals, social workers, or community-based navigators – to refer individuals to community resources that support social, emotional, and practical well-being. Rather than focusing solely on symptoms, social prescribing recognizes social connection as a key driver of health. In prior planning conversations, partners noted that the Fox Valley already has many of the building blocks needed for this approach, including a robust network of community organizations, trusted navigators, and existing resource platforms. However, coordination, shared workflows, and sustainable infrastructure remain significant barriers.

In response, The Connection is exploring the development of a pilot social prescribing program as an incubating idea emerging from Connected Fox Valley. This pilot would focus on testing a coordinated, community-centered model that links healthcare and human service systems with local social connection and basic needs supports. Early planning has emphasized starting small, centering equity and lived experience, and learning alongside partners as the model evolves. If launched, the pilot would generate practical lessons about implementation, partnership, and impact – helping inform longer-term strategies to embed social prescribing into the region’s systems of care as a scalable approach to prevention, connection, and well-being.