The mission of the Social Health Institute is to expand access to training, curriculum development and implementation of the Listening with Curiosity Project (LCP): an empirically proven intervention for increasing human connection, fostering empathy, and combating stereotyping by helping (re)build the innate human skills of relational intelligence (RQ).

Anchored in the pioneering developmental science of Dr. Niobe Way (NYU) and educational research of Dr. Joseph D. Nelson (Swarthmore), the LCP has been implemented in NYC public schools and universities around the world since 2016. Our evaluation research indicates that the LCP method of fostering RQ skills enhances social and emotional skills and wellbeing, academic and work engagement, and an increased sense of a common humanity.  

As the World Health Organization quantified in a recent report, feelings of loneliness and isolation–and their direct impact on physical, economic, and mental health– represent a worldwide crisis. In his 2023 Advisory, then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned urgently of the dangers a lack of social connection poses for both individual and societal health. 

Providing one of the only known empirically-proven interventions for addressing the crisis of connection, the Social Health Institute (SHi) is singularly positioned to respond.