By Kendall Worth
One of my loyal supporters of Journalism for What Matters recently contacted me with two questions about my proposed Social Prescribing Organization. According to this supporter, these questions have also been raised by people within her network after she shared information from my BLOG with them.
After taking some time to think about the questions, I decided they deserved more than a private response. They raise important issues about what Social Prescribing can realistically accomplish, what role government and public policy have in addressing social isolation, and how a Social Prescribing Organization would actually help people make meaningful social connections.
At the same time, privacy is important. The BLOG supporter who brought these questions to me does not wish to be publicly identified, and neither do the people within her network who originally raised the questions. I am therefore respecting their privacy while bringing the questions themselves forward for public discussion.
My answers also come from a First Voice perspective. They are informed by the experiences of people I advocate for, conversations I have had in the community, my years of poverty-related journalism, and my own advocacy work.
Question #1 – If the problem is on the individual psychological level, how can you solve it on the political level?
This is an important question because there is a difference between what government can do and what government cannot do.
Government cannot manufacture friendship. Politicians cannot pass a law requiring somebody to become another person's friend, and a Social Prescribing Organization cannot guarantee that two people introduced to one another will develop a lasting friendship.
However, that does not mean social isolation is exclusively an individual or psychological problem.
Public policy can influence the conditions under which people try to build healthy, socially connected lives. Government can fund programs, change policies, remove financial barriers, support community organizations, and make services available to people who otherwise have very few opportunities to connect with others.
This distinction has been part of my journalism for many years.
Before starting Journalism for What Matters, I wrote extensively about poverty and social isolation for the Nova Scotia Advocate. Readers can find my past reporting here:
https://nsadvocate.org/author/kendall-worth/
One example is this article about the difficulties that can occur when friendships end:
https://nsadvocate.org/2017/03/27/downright-difficult-kendall-worth-on-friendships-ending/
As I discussed in that article, friendship itself is personal. Government cannot wave a magic wand and bring new friends into someone's life. However, government can help create the opportunities, supports and environments where people have a better chance of meeting others, learning about healthy relationships and boundaries, participating in their communities, and reducing their social isolation.
That brings us to Social Prescribing.
In this 2019 Nova Scotia Advocate article, I first wrote about the idea of Social Prescribing:
https://nsadvocate.org/2019/01/28/kendall-worth-on-friendship-poverty-and-feeling-discouraged/
That article came from conversations with people living in poverty who talked about wanting friends and social contacts outside places such as soup kitchens and drop-ins. Some spoke about wanting like-minded people in their lives who could provide encouragement and ordinary human connection.
Years later, I continue reporting on and advocating for Social Prescribing through Journalism for What Matters:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/search/label/social%20prescribing
I see Social Prescribing as one possible response to a much larger issue I have documented extensively—social isolation. See here. This is where the political level becomes important. One proposal I continue to advocate for is the creation of a Social Prescribing Organization. See here for details and links My argument is that government has a role in helping make this type of support available and accessible. In Nova Scotia, I would like to see Social Prescribing become better connected with the health-care and mental-health systems, while also involving community organizations and non-clinical supports. In other words, the government would not be creating someone's friendships. It would be helping create and fund the infrastructure that gives socially isolated people more opportunities to make those connections themselves.
There is another political side to this issue that cannot be ignored: government policy itself can sometimes contribute to the conditions that encourage social isolation. I have been writing about the cohabitation policies of Community Services for years. This Nova Scotia Advocate article, for example, also contains links to three earlier articles I wrote about couples receiving Income Assistance See here and I have continued covering cohabitation issues on my current BLOG See Here.
In particular, I have called for changes to Section 6.1.8 of the Employment Support and Income Assistance policy manual.
In this BLOG post, "Social Isolation is NOT OK: ESIA Policies Need to Change!", I explain why I believe this is connected to the larger issue of social isolation:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/2024/10/social-isolation-is-not-ok-esia.html
People can benefit socially, emotionally and financially from sharing their lives and homes with other people. When government policies create financial consequences for certain living arrangements, we need to ask whether those policies unintentionally create another barrier to social connection. Unlike someone's personal friendships, government policy is something politicians actually do have the power to change.
Therefore, my answer to Question #1 is that we should not think of this as either an individual problem or a political problem. There can be elements of both.
The personal side may involve loneliness, social anxiety, friendship difficulties, relationship boundaries, confidence and individual circumstances. The political side involves whether affordable programs exist, whether people can access them, whether government policies create additional barriers, and whether reducing social isolation is treated as a legitimate public-policy and community-health objective.
Government cannot promise somebody a friend.
But government can help ensure that people are not left without opportunities to find friendship, community and human connection.
Social Prescribing Is Not a Replacement for Professional Mental-Health Treatment
There is another important clarification that needs to be made when answering this question.
When I advocate for Social Prescribing and for the creation of a Social Prescribing Organization, I am not suggesting that Social Prescribing should replace professional mental-health treatment.
Doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, social workers and other trained professionals have important roles in providing clinical treatment, counselling, assessments and other professional supports. Someone experiencing a mental-health condition may need these professional services, and participating in Social Prescribing should not be viewed as a substitute for receiving appropriate professional care.
What I am arguing is that professional mental-health services and Social Prescribing can serve different but complementary purposes.
A psychiatrist, psychologist or counsellor can provide professional treatment and support, but their role is not to become someone's friend. A doctor's appointment cannot necessarily provide someone with people to attend community events with. A counselling appointment cannot automatically create a circle of friends for somebody who goes home afterwards to an empty apartment and spends much of their day socially isolated.
That is where Social Prescribing can help fill a different gap.
Social Prescribing can help connect people with community activities, peer supports, social groups, opportunities to meet people and other non-clinical forms of support. My proposed Social Prescribing Organization would build upon this idea by creating structured opportunities for people who are socially isolated to participate in their communities and develop healthy human connections.
This distinction is especially important because, for some socially isolated people, much of their regular human contact may be with professionals—doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, social workers and other service providers. Those professional relationships can be extremely important, but they are not the same thing as friendship, companionship, peer connection or belonging to a community.
A healthy support system should not require someone to choose between professional mental-health treatment and community connection. Where appropriate, people should be able to have both.
This is also why I believe Social Prescribing deserves attention within our health-care and mental-health systems. The purpose is not to turn friendship into medical treatment, and it is not to expect community activities to solve every mental-health problem. Instead, it is about recognizing that a person's quality of life can also be affected by whether they have opportunities for meaningful social connection outside of the professional services they receive.
Therefore, when I talk about addressing social isolation politically, I am not asking government to replace psychologists with social programs or doctors with friends.
I am asking government to recognize that professional treatment and meaningful human connection are different needs—and that our communities should have systems capable of supporting both.
Question #2 – I would also like clarification about the mechanism through which you are getting people to connect with each other.
This question gets directly into how my proposed Social Prescribing Organization could work in practice. The goal would not simply be to put two strangers in a room and tell them, "You are now friends."Instead, the organization would create structured opportunities for people to meet, interact and discover whether they have enough in common for a friendship or other healthy social connection to develop naturally.
We have already seen small-scale examples of what this can look like.
One example is the Friend Speed Dating/Speed Friending event I promoted on my BLOG:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/2026/07/promoting-upcomming-friend-speed-dating.html
I later followed up on what could be learned from that event:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/2026/08/whether-we-want-to-call-idea-speed.html
An event like Speed Friending creates a structured environment in which people can meet several other people, have conversations and potentially discover shared interests. Nobody is guaranteed to leave with a new best friend. The important point is that people are given an opportunity to make connections that might not otherwise have happened.
Another example comes from All Together Link:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/search/label/All%20Together%20Link
All Together Link originally began as the Mitigating Social Isolation Project:
https://worthmatters.blogspot.com/search/label/mitigating%20social%20isolation
Experiences and models like these can help inform how a larger Social Prescribing Organization could operate.
It is important for me to clarify for readers—especially those who are newer to Journalism for What Matters—that All Together Link is no longer operating. Although I continue to refer to All Together Link as an example of how people experiencing social isolation can be brought together and given opportunities to connect, the project came to an end in June 2024 and we were unable to continue it beyond that point. Readers should therefore understand that I am referring to All Together Link as a past project and a learning experience, not as a service that is currently available. You can read my past reporting about All Together Link, including the circumstances surrounding its conclusion.
Anyway now to continue on with answering this current Question:
The mechanism I envision could involve several different pathways. A person experiencing social isolation could be referred to the organization through a health-care provider, mental-health professional, social worker, community organization or another appropriate referral source. There should also be consideration given to allowing people to approach the organization themselves.
From there, the organization could learn about the person's interests, circumstances and what type of social connection they are looking for.
Someone might be interested in meeting people for coffee and conversation. Someone else might want a person or group to attend community events with. Another person might benefit from a support group, a friendship or boundaries workshop, a peer-support connection, intergenerational programming, or activities centred around a shared interest.
The organization could then provide structured opportunities for those connections to begin.
This is an important distinction: the Social Prescribing Organization would create the opportunity for connection. The individuals themselves would ultimately decide whether a genuine friendship develops.
There would also need to be safeguards. Participation should be voluntary. Personal boundaries need to be respected. People need realistic expectations about what the organization can and cannot provide. There should also be clear policies dealing with safety, confidentiality, appropriate conduct and what happens when a particular social connection is not a good fit.
Finally, there is the question of money.
Programming, staff, meeting spaces, peer-support initiatives, outreach and coordination all cost money. Finding sustainable funding for a Social Prescribing Organization could therefore be one of the biggest challenges involved in turning this proposal into reality.
And that brings us right back to Question #1.
If we agree that reducing social isolation has value for community well-being, mental health and quality of life, then there is a legitimate public-policy discussion to be had about whether government should help fund the infrastructure necessary to make these opportunities available.
Government cannot create friendships.
But government, health-care providers, community organizations and First Voice participants can work together to create more opportunities for friendships and healthy social connections to happen.
That is the political and community-level solution I am advocating for.
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