New Survey Highlights a National Crisis of Connection
By Jean Rhodes
The recently released Social Connection in America 2025 survey reveals a nation in the midst of a profound crisis of disconnection. Nearly three-quarters of American adults report getting together with close relationships twice a month or less, and 41 percent experience loneliness at least some of the time. Perhaps most troubling, a majority report never participating in clubs, religious services, organized volunteering, or neighborhood activities. These patterns extend beyond subjective loneliness: Americans have smaller social networks, infrequent interaction, and minimal engagement with community life. This isolation is a major public health concern. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness and isolation underscores social connection as a public health priority. Lacking social connection is associated with a 32 percent increased risk of premature death due to social isolation and a 14 percent increase due to loneliness. The consequences include elevated risks of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, and anxiety, placing social connection alongside exercise and nutrition as a core determinant of health.
The Social Connection survey also identifies groups that are particularly vulnerable to disconnection, including individuals with lower income and education, those who have never married, and LGBTQ populations. These same groups are underrepresented among volunteer mentors, who are more likely to be white, female, and college educated. This mismatch highlights the need for targeted recruitment and support strategies. Research on volunteer motivations suggests that mentoring programs should appeal to a range of motivations, including humanitarian values, community responsibility, and personal growth. Teye and Peaslee found that values-based motivations were most frequently cited, with 45 percent of mentors reporting altruistic reasons for helping youth. Social motivations, such as encouragement from friends and family, also played a substantial role, suggesting the promise of peer-based recruitment. At the same time, the shift toward online communities, particularly among young adults, may contribute to lower rates of time-intensive, in-person volunteerism. Programs that offer high-quality training, ongoing support, and flexible scheduling consistently show stronger mentor retention.
Mentoring programs offer a scalable response to the social connection crisis. Unlike professional services constrained by cost and capacity, volunteer mentoring leverages community members as a resource for sustained social connection. The interpersonal nature of mentoring fosters trust, empathy, and identity development. These are outcomes that are difficult to achieve through brief or transactional interventions. For both mentors and mentees, these relationships cultivate a sense of mattering that directly counters experiences of disconnection.
Mentoring represents a distinctive form of civic engagement, one that typically requires regular face-to-face interaction and relationship building. Our analysis of a decade of Census survey data shows that mentoring demands substantial commitment, with many programs requiring at least 36 hours of contact annually, roughly equivalent to weekly meetings over an academic year. This sustained engagement contrasts sharply with broader declines in volunteerism. Although national volunteer rates have fallen significantly over the past decade, the proportion of adults serving as volunteer mentors for at least one academic or school year has remained remarkably stable, albeit low—about one percent of the population, or 2.5 million individuals, each year. This stability suggests that the relational depth of mentoring creates a volunteer experience resilient to the social and economic forces that deter less intensive forms of civic participation. The challenge now is to expand mentoring capacity while addressing persistent retention challenges and demographic disparities.
