Reimagining Volunteering as a Bridge to Connection

Q (Alissa) : You’ve built purpose-driven organizations like Taproot, Imperative, and Board.dev, and now you’ve launched the U.S. Chamber of Connection. Why did you decide connection was the next big thing to take on?

A (Aaron): Last year, I stopped to reflect on what I saw as the greatest challenge facing our country, and it was connection. My inspiration for this goes back to my grandfather. He was one of the first naval officers in Hitler’s bunker at the end of World War II and later helped rebuild Germany through the Marshall Plan. Working with people you had just fought against, he realized the only way to bring people together was through shared purpose—through service side by side.

A decade later, while serving in the Kennedy administration, he proposed the idea of sending Americans abroad for two years to engage in shared purpose. That idea became the Peace Corps. His experience showed me that connection across differences isn’t just possible—it’s necessary. That has been the throughline of my career as well: using service and shared purpose to bridge divides and build stronger communities.

Q (Alissa) : You’ve broken connection down into specific pillars. Can you walk us through those?

A (Aaron): Connection is a word we use often, but most people don’t know what it really means in practice. We looked at research across fields like urban planning, civic engagement, health, and education, and found there wasn’t clear advice for individuals on what they need to thrive. Out of that, we identified six actionable pillars:

1. Neighbors – Everyone needs a neighbor they can call in an emergency—someone they actually know and trust.
   
2. Strong one-on-one relationships – The strongest predictor of happiness and longevity. This looks like meeting two or three people each week for an hour of open, meaningful conversation.
   
3. Third places – Community spaces outside of home and work where you can interact with others. These don’t always build deep relationships, but they create familiarity and belonging.
   
4. Community around identity – A group that shares some aspect of your identity or life experience, whether it’s race, religion, parenthood, or a shared background. These communities accelerate bonding.
   
5. Community of play – Play is critical to connection. Sports, arts, and hobbies help us bond—often with people who are different from us—and build trust faster.
   
6. Service – Contributing to something bigger than yourself is essential. The strongest relationships come from serving others, not just focusing on ourselves.
   

Our work is about helping people intentionally design their lives around these six forms of connection.

Q (Alissa) : Many people feel that life today is just home and work, without play, identity-based community, or third places. How do you see this gap?

A (Aaron): Most people are missing several of the six points of connection. Many only have one place—home or work—and that’s it. A big part of our work is helping people recognize what’s missing and why it matters. Ideally, we’d start teaching this at a young age, reinforce it as people grow, and design organizations and even public policy around it. We need to redesign society to intentionally build these six forms of connection.

Q (Alissa) : You’ve mentioned service as a form of connection. More broadly, what behaviors can help people build toward these different modes of connection?

A (Aaron): The six points themselves are concrete behaviors, but social science also gives us useful concepts for understanding connection: bonding and bridging.

• Bonding connections are with people similar to you—family, close colleagues, or friends who share your background. They give us psychological safety.
  
• Bridging connections are with people different from you—across race, gender, profession, or perspective. They build trust and broaden our horizons.
  
  

Right now, we face both an epidemic of loneliness (from a lack of bonding) and an epidemic of lost trust (from a lack of bridging). The two reinforce each other—without bonding, it’s hard to have the safety required for bridging.

We also distinguish between strong and weak ties:

• Strong ties are people you interact with often, where trust is high.
  
• Weak ties are more casual—like a barista you see weekly or a colleague you meet occasionally.
  

Weak ties can grow into strong ones, but both matter. When we measure connection, the key lenses are bonding vs. bridging and strong vs. weak ties. Those four dimensions give us a way to understand and build healthier networks of connection.

Q (Alissa) : You mentioned bonding, bridging, and strong vs. weak ties. How are these concepts useful beyond a personal lens?

A (Aaron): They’re valuable for organizations and policymakers, too. You can ask: within my organization, where are the strong and weak ties? How are we supporting bonding, which often drives productivity, versus bridging, which fuels innovation? A lot of my past work has been about building bonding and bridging capital inside companies and using that to influence culture.

Q (Alissa) : What does that look like inside a company? How is the workplace context unique when it comes to connection?

A (Aaron): The workplace is unique because it already has shared purpose—people are working toward common goals in a shared culture. The priorities often center on productivity, which depends on trust, cohesion, clarity of goals, and retention. High attrition slows everything down, so connection directly impacts performance.

But when it comes to innovation, bonding alone isn’t enough. If the same group is always connecting, they’re unlikely to generate new ideas. Sustained innovation comes from bridging—bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds in intentional ways. Avoiding silos is key.

At Imperative, the company I founded, we focused on this. We used AI to design virtual conversations that helped people strengthen ties and build both bonding and bridging connections. It was a way to shape culture at scale through intentional relationships.

There’s also a growing field—organizational network analysis—that maps companies through the lens of connection. It’s highly predictive of performance and many other outcomes.

Q (Alissa) : In your book The Purpose Economy, you cited Gallup data showing about 70% of the workforce was disengaged. That was over a decade ago. Now, with hybrid work, the pandemic, AI, and the loneliness epidemic, disengagement still feels pressing. How is the Chamber of Connection working to change that narrative? Is the problem different today, or just a new version of the same challenge?

A (Aaron): About 10 years ago, we partnered with NYU on the first study of purpose in the workplace and found that two-thirds of employees were unfulfilled. Only 1 in 3 felt fulfilled at work—and fulfillment is highly predictive of performance, retention, and whether someone is a brand ambassador.

I’d argue the situation has only worsened. Remote work, workplace stress, and global uncertainty have amplified it. If we measured today, I suspect even fewer people would feel fulfilled.

Fulfillment comes down to three things: relationships, impact, and growth—what we called “RIG.” Almost nothing else matters. In most workplaces, there’s focus on impact and some on growth, but relationships—the foundation—have eroded. Remote work, fear of layoffs, and now AI threatening job security all contribute.

In industries like tech, mass layoffs have added to the problem. When leaders say, “That’s one less FTE,” they overlook that for many, that was their closest friend at work. We treat relationships as expendable, but cutting them damages fulfillment in profound ways. This is a fundamental break in how workplaces think about connection.

Q (Alissa) : Given that reality, how can workplaces and communities design for connection intentionally, instead of relying on superficial moments like donuts in the kitchen or team outings?

A (Aaron): The key is to design connection into the employee experience from the very beginning.

It starts with job descriptions—why not highlight the relationships people will be able to build? Then through hiring and onboarding: are candidates and new employees having real human interactions, or is it all transactional? Onboarding, especially, should prioritize time to build connections. Define roles and tasks with relationships in mind, map out the key connections that matter for each person’s career path, and provide guidance on how to nurture them. Managers should make connection part of ongoing development conversations.

Culture is another layer. Every meeting should have a human-level check-in before diving into tasks. One-on-ones should start with connection first. In-person time should be structured and purposeful—people don’t need more happy hours or donuts, which usually stay at the surface and work better for extroverts. They want meaningful, guided interaction.

Even at large events like all-hands, the most valuable moments are always when employees get to talk to one another, yet most of the time is spent with leaders talking at them. We need to flip that—design for interaction first.

And beyond all this, service—how organizations approach service and volunteering—can be a powerful lever for building authentic connection inside the workplace.

When we think about service, why do you think being in service to the community and volunteering are so powerful in building connection?

A (Aaron): It starts with creating a shared purpose—something bigger than yourself or your company. Service also sparks reflection, and reflecting together builds empathy and strengthens bonds.

It pushes people outside their comfort zone, creating vulnerability, which deepens connection within teams. And the act of giving itself shifts your mindset—it puts you in a positive emotional state, away from fear and scarcity, toward abundance. In that mindset, it’s easier to connect because you see possibilities, not competition.

The challenge is that volunteering has become transactional, virtual, and episodic. We’ve stripped away the human element, and it’s backfiring. To rebuild connection, we need to design service with intention—through context, reflection before and after, and space for interaction. The act alone isn’t enough; it’s shared reflection that creates meaning.

Unless we design for bonding before, during, and after service, opportunities for connection get lost. That’s one of the main things we need to address.

Q (Alissa) : That makes sense. The service-learning approach you describe feels really powerful—building in reflection, connection, and vulnerability. Sharing vulnerability creates trust within and across teams. So, as we design volunteer experiences in the workplace, what should we focus on?

A (Aaron): One big area is the entry and exit of volunteering. Being clear upfront about the types of connection each experience offers helps employees choose intentionally.

We also need to expand our view beyond team bonding—to include connection with the nonprofit, recipients, and organizers. And more broadly, we should stop treating connection as a byproduct. Connection itself should be a cause.

One of the biggest challenges today is declining trust and connection. Volunteering can directly address that if we frame it differently. Even something like starting a running club at work can be a form of service—because it builds connection.

We need to reframe volunteering with connection at the forefront, not as an afterthought.

Q (Alissa) : Why do you think companies rarely name connection as an issue to address directly?

A (Aaron): Right, because connection isn’t treated as a cause. There are no resources behind it, and volunteering isn’t optimized around it. We just hope it happens as a byproduct. But it should be an end in itself.

Over 70% of our happiness is based on relationships. Yet most people don’t have enough of them. It’s like having a hunger crisis and doing nothing to feed people. That’s where we are with connection.

A lot of my work now is pushing philanthropy and volunteering to move connection up the list of causes. Alongside arts, environment, and others—connection deserves a seat at the table.

Q (Alissa) : It reminds me of the show Blue Zones. In those communities, people live past 100, and one of the key factors is connection—community ties and relationships. That’s something we’re thinking about all the time at Goodera.

It’s why our worlds align so naturally and why we’re partnering with you to launch Q (Alissa) : You’ve built purpose-driven organizations like Taproot, Imperative, and Board.dev, and now you’ve launched the U.S. Chamber of Connection. Why did you decide connection was the next big thing to take on? We’ve been talking about service as a gateway to connection and even a movement. Where do you see this movement going in the next 5–10 years?

A (Aaron): Service can be the spark. People may resist working on connection in their own lives, but if asked to help others with connection, they volunteer readily—and in doing so, they work on it themselves. This can scale to millions of people, bridging communities and rebuilding trust.

At the corporate and policy level, connection will be elevated like health—resourced, measured, and tracked as one of the strongest predictors of happiness and longevity. It should be part of company dashboards, national dashboards, and education systems.

We also need to broaden the definition of service. Hosting a block party, potluck, or running club builds connection and should be seen as service. Often, volunteers benefit as much as recipients, and we should acknowledge that.

My vision is for companies to support millions of these connection-based activities. That would transform how we think about service. With Taproot Foundation, we redefined corporate service. With Goodera, it has scaled globally. Now, with Volunteering Reconnected, the next step is to put connection at the core of service and scale it to a level few thought possible.

Q (Alissa) : Why did you choose the name Volunteering Reconnected, and what does it mean to you?‍

A (Aaron): Historically, volunteering started at a village level—helping neighbors and forming connection naturally. As society scaled, service became more abstracted. Volunteering Reconnected emphasizes making service core to culture, with connection as the binding force.

This also builds on a previous initiative I led, Volunteering Reimagined, which highlighted that nonprofits using volunteers effectively outperform those that don’t. We introduced the concept of a Service Enterprise, showing that organizations that engage volunteers are stronger, not weaker. Similarly, Volunteering Reconnected aims to define and revitalize service to bring people and communities together.

Q (Alissa) : People are craving in-person connection after the pandemic. How does that factor into this initiative?‍

A (Aaron): I agree. While people want in-person engagement, our societal skills for interacting face-to-face have declined. Some feel anxious about it. We need to build these skills from childhood onward, helping people have meaningful, vulnerable interactions. These relational skills are becoming critical for well-being and the future of work, especially in an AI-driven world.

Q (Alissa) : For those joining Volunteering Reconnected on October 15th, what can they expect?‍

A (Aaron): The event in Silicon Valley is designed as a day of personal and collaborative design. Participants will reflect on their own connection experiences, strengthen or build friendships, and develop actionable plans for connection in their lives.

They’ll receive a briefing on the current state of connection and service, then break into design studios to address challenges like optimizing volunteering for bridging connections. Solutions will be shared, imagining how service might evolve over the next three years.

This isn’t just an event—it’s about shaping the future of a service movement. Participants will leave with commitments for personal, institutional, and civic change. This kickoff will grow annually into a broader community dedicated to reconnecting America.

We’re doing it together with Goodera. The event will bring together leaders in corporate service, philanthropy, HR, and national experts in social connection and service.

Partners include UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Foundation for Social Connection, Idealist, VolunteerMatch, Big Think, NationSwell, and more. The insights and solutions developed won’t stay in the room—they’ll spread across the field, amplifying impact nationwide.

Q (Alissa) : So, to wrap up—what’s one small shift people can make when they think about connection? One thing they can take away and do today?‍

A (Aaron): Great question. I’d say: think of one thing you can do today to reach out and connect with someone. Just one thing. If you do that every day, it creates a flywheel of connection.

It could be reaching out to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, or expressing gratitude to someone important to you. Tomorrow, ask yourself again: what’s one small thing I can do? In your next meeting, maybe check in with people first. Or reach out to someone new.

The wonderful thing about connection is that anything you do for it is also service—because you can’t connect alone. Everyone is struggling with connection, so when you work on it, you’re helping others too.

There’s no greater way to help yourself and others than to invest in connection.