Connection: The Word That Defines Our Mission in 2025
Feeling disconnected? In 2025, If Lost Start Here is making connection our word of the year. Read why it matters now more than ever and discover three ways to reconnect with yourself, others, and the world around you.
We live in an age of paradox. Never before have we been so hyper-connected—constantly plugged into notifications, messages, and social media feeds. And yet, we are also lonelier, more isolated, and more disconnected than ever.
Recent studies paint a concerning picture:
One in three adults worldwide experience loneliness regularly.
The former U.S. Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy has declared loneliness an epidemic, citing its impact on physical and mental health, including higher risks of depression, anxiety, and even heart disease.
Social fragmentation is rising due to remote work, an increase in digital communication over in-person interactions, and the pressures of modern life that leave us exhausted and stretched thin.
At If Lost Start Here, we believe that the antidote to this growing crisis isn’t just found in another self-help book or productivity hack. It’s in connection. Connection with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us. It’s in deep conversations, small moments of presence, and shared experiences that remind us we’re not alone.
So in 2025, we’re making connection our focus. Not just as a word, but as a way of living.
Three Ways to Reconnect in 2025
At If Lost Start Here, we don’t just talk about wellbeing; we create experiences that help people feel it. Here are three ways we’re helping you reconnect this year:
1. Reconnecting with Yourself
True connection starts within. When was the last time you checked in with yourself—not just to tick off a to-do list, but to ask what you really need?
Here’s how we help:
Guided Wellbeing Courses – Our Find Your Way program helps you build an everyday wellbeing practice that supports emotional, mental, and physical balance.
One-on-One Coaching – Sometimes, you need a conversation that brings clarity. Our coaching sessions offer a space for self-reflection, emotional support, and guidance.
Creative Reflections – Whether through journaling prompts, gentle reset practices, or curiosity-driven exercises, we provide simple ways to get back in touch with yourself.
2. Reconnecting with Others
Loneliness isn’t just about physical isolation—it’s about the feeling that no one really sees you. The good news? Human connection isn’t about how many friends you have but the depth of the relationships you cultivate.
We’re creating spaces for real connection through our community The Collective Together and our Events including:
Small Group Sessions – Intimate, guided conversations where people can show up as they are, without pretense.
Community Gatherings & Events – From online wellbeing retreats to informal meetups, we’re bringing people together to connect meaningfully.
Shared Learning Experiences – Whether it’s a book club, a workshop, or a wellbeing challenge, we believe in collective learning as a way to strengthen relationships.
3. Reconnecting with the World
When we feel disconnected, it’s easy to shrink inward. But sometimes, the best way to find ourselves is to expand outward—to seek inspiration, to engage with the world in new ways.
Maybe that means stepping into a gallery where a single painting stops you in your tracks. Or walking through a city park and feeling the crisp air shift something inside you. Maybe it’s volunteering for a cause that reminds you just how much you have to give.
We believe in the power of small, intentional experiences to help you feel more anchored in the world around you. That’s why we’re:
Creating Wellbeing Prescriptions – Sometimes, we all need a little direction. Our personalised wellbeing prescriptions offer a roadmap to help you reconnect with what nourishes you—whether that’s more rest, creativity, movement, or something unexpected.
Offering Culture Therapy – We believe that books, art, music, and creative resources have the power to heal and inspire. Our culture therapy sessions help you find new ways to engage with the world through stories, creativity, and shared human experiences.
Curating a Guidebook to Connection – We’re mapping out places—cafés, museums, parks, and cultural spaces—that help you feel a little more at home in the world. Because sometimes, the right environment can make all the difference.
The world is full of places, experiences, and ideas waiting to reconnect you. Let’s explore them—together.
Connection: The Heart of Our Mission
At If Lost Start Here, we believe connection isn’t just something we do—it’s something we build, something we feel, something that makes life worth living.
As we step more into 2025, we invite you to reconnect with what matters most. To make space for deep conversations, real relationships, and a sense of belonging. To not just exist but to engage fully in life.
If you’re ready to start feeling more connected, we’d love to support you.
Explore Our Wellbeing Courses & Coaching
Join One of Our Community Sessions
Because no one should have to find their way alone.
Let’s Stay Connected—Join Us
If this piece resonated with you, let’s keep the conversation going. Our newsletter is a space for real connection—where we share insights on wellbeing, stories that inspire, and small ways to feel more anchored in your life.
It’s not just another email. It’s a moment of pause, a reminder that you’re not alone, and an invitation to explore what truly matters.
Sign up now and let’s navigate this year—together.
The Civic Kitchen
A civic-minded kitchen classroom in San Francisco to get you cooking whether it scares or excites you.
What is it: A purpose-built kitchen classroom in the city of San Francisco designed for home cooks to master culinary skills. The Civic Kitchen will get you cooking.
What you need to know: Co-founders Chris Bonomo and Jen Nurse opened The Civic Kitchen in 2018 with a belief that anyone can learn to cook. Their Mission Street space has a program of accessible cooking classes taught by knowledgeable local chefs in a supportive and welcoming environment. The roster of classes, which in person never go about 14 attendees, cover the basics like knife skills and baking, through to more in-depth studies like a recent evening on sweet and savory souffles. The schedule goes beyond just making food though, to also talking about it (with Salt + Spine Cookbook Club), documenting it (with lessons on food styling and photography), and writing about it (a current offering is how to pitch a Cookbook of your own).
Why you’ll love it: This is not your typical classroom. This light-filled space feels like a home cook’s playground, from its brightly colored 20ft long floor-to-ceiling Cookbook Library through to a fully kitted out kitchen with its three ranges, double oven, and all the ingredients you could possibly need. The Civic Kitchen is all about practical hands-on learning and connecting with others as you sharpen those skills. During class, you’ll don an apron, get chopping and mixing, and make a meal to be enjoyed with your classmates on its central communal table.
What they offer online and off: Refresh those cooking skills during the pandemic with online workshops and wine tastings. Rather than the one-way of YouTube, learning from a kind person who is there with you in your own kitchen (albeit via a screen), can help instill more confidence and even joy in your cooking.
Why we think it matters: Vulnerability binds, but food connects us. With a motto of “Kindness in the kitchen”, The Civic Kitchen makes preparing a meal as much about bringing us together as about assembling ingredients. Co-founder Nurse encourages civility in all encounters with cooking, from learning about other cultures — along with the respect that must go with that — and finding a common language in preparing a shared meal. By taking the fear factor out of food, and giving us a much-needed alternative to food delivery apps, The Civic Kitchen is also creating a path back to nourishing ourselves and supporting a better ecosystem around food and how and where we get our daily meals.
In their own words: “We have built The Civic Kitchen from the ground up to be the perfect place for home cooks to learn.”
What next: Learn one meal that you can prepare for yourself, and one meal you can share with others. Something that you love to eat, and something you think others will. Two meals. That’s a start. Then keep going. A brunch for Sunday mornings. A lunch to break up WFH days. A grabbable snack as you race out the door. Something to make with kids, or grandparents. A classic that you’d choose in a restaurant. A dish to pack in a picnic basket. We much prefer this approach to selecting starters, mains, and desserts that you find in typical cookbooks. Give life boundaries around the food you make to make it relevant, accessible, and meaningful again.
To find out more: Website / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter
Additionally, try: 18 Reasons / Bite Unite
RISE
Somerset’s RISE is both a place to come together and a modern day twist on traditional church.
“A place to relax, play, work, eat. A place to be together”
Above the entrance is a simple sign that says ‘Rise’. This sets the tone for all that goes on inside: a café, bakery and play space, an active calendar of workshops, events and activities, office space for socially-minded businesses, and a contemporary art gallery that shouts out local and national talent. Here, in a sensitively converted church, are all those components that once made this space so appealing to the congregation it previously housed: community, positivity, hope and connection.
Three years ago, Io Fox and Ed Roberts, a former teacher and nurse, bought this church, originally built in the early 1800s. It had fallen in recent years on its own hard times. The congregation of the United Reform Church had been dwindling for a while, so much so that the building was put on the market. But rather than shape this space into luxury apartments or private offices, the new owners did something remarkable. They shifted the emphasis to a wider purpose, giving a modern spin to the architecture, history and ideals this church once offered. Through their renovations, they weren’t intent on erasing what had once past, but rather building on it. Everywhere there are traces of what the building was before: etched arched windows, stone plaques, a working organ that dominates the main space. Keeping the look and feel of the place, they acknowledged its abiding history, and even embraced its former community and intent (a couple has since got married here).
They also did this, they allowed the community in which it sits in Frome, a small town in Somerset known for its creativity, a say in how this project evolved. They kept those long-time hallowed doors open to whoever needed them in maybe a different way, inviting in businesses, practitioners, parents, and charities who were seeking space to develop initiatives of their own. They welcomed everyone, with the aim of similarly nurturing people within its walls, so that Rise could truly reflect the community in which it is situated. And the local people that it served, answered the call, creating a new sense of life in this space, forming and shaping its content, giving this building new and more relevant purpose.
Three years on, Rise is now a buzzing multi-use space. The central atrium has been given over to Rye Bakery which runs a friendly café incorporating local suppliers, simple food and organic sources where possible. On Friday it hosts community building pizza nights. There’s also a play space (Alfred’s Tower) for the little ones, which has a handmade feel to it, a nice antidote to the bright plastic that usually comes with the kid’s area, and a sweet reading space. Most laudable though is the stunning woven nest space, a semi-private huddle for nursing moms and for smaller gatherings.
The mezzanine space where the congregation would once have sat, has become an increasingly well regarded contemporary art gallery, The Whittox Gallery, curated by Sara Robson. It shows local and national contemporary artists and designers in an exhibition program that roams across all media.
Sort of behind the scenes, The Old School and The Sun Room, have become spaces to hire by anyone, for private and public events. The downstairs offices and work spaces have been rented out to socially-minded organizations, like OpenStoryTellers, a charity that aims to empower people with learning disabilities and autism.
Across all these spaces are an active range of classes, workshops and events for all ages, abilities and backgrounds such as yoga classes, wellbeing sessions (like one on unleashing creative genius), exercise groups (see the popular Mojo moves and hoop dances), art and science clubs. A therapeutic choir just started in the space.
Rise is a modern-day church without really being a church at all. It works within that rich history of places where people gather, connect and believe, and gives those very fundamental human needs a thoroughly modern-day twist. In its name and its mission, Rise uplifts those who work here, engage here and play here. There’s a reason churches were once the heart of the community, and there’s a reason why Rise has become a space that local people flock to again.
18 Reasons
18 Reasons is no ordinary cookery school. Even that vague bucket of a place holder doesn’t entirely encompass what this storefront is.
“18 REASONS - EMPOWERING OUR COMMUNITY WITH THE CONFIDENCE AND CREATIVITY TO BUY, COOK, AND EAT GOOD FOOD EVERY DAY.”
The Community Cooking School 18 Reasons has been a staple of San Francisco’s foodie Mission district for over a decade. Founded by Sam Mogannam as a non-profit extension of his popular family-run grocery store Bi-Rite Market to further his interests in food and community, 18 Reasons is now part of an esteemed community of businesses that includes one of the best ice-cream shops in the city and a 3-acre Sonoma farm.
18 Reasons is no ordinary cookery school though. Even that vague bucket of a place holder doesn’t entirely encompass what this storefront is. Yes, there’s the classroom at the 18th Street space that has a family-style dinner table set-up and a fully equipped teaching kitchen. It offers hands-on lessons on everything from eating more meatless and fish butchery, to food as medicine and mini-culinary boot camps on whatever it is you long to cook. It was here that I learnt how to really wash and prep leeks as well as how to eat mindfully. Both of equal value.
If you want to go on a deeper dive into food culture you can attend their 6-month Farm School at Bi-Rite’s wine country outpost, which gets you into the nitty gritty of the food system including planting and harvesting and is taught by the company’s own buyers and farmers. For a more cerebral though equally as fun take (past programs have included the seminal question: ‘what if Wes Anderson made s’mores’), in October, there’s the Annual Food + Farm Food Fest, that has been running since 2013 and this year takes place at the Roxie Theater.
What most excites us though about 18 Reasons is how it situates food within community, at every practical level. There’s the cookbook lending library – an inspired idea as we cycle through multiple volumes each year and sheepishly hand them back splattered and floured to our local, maybe less understanding, civic library. Communal dinners are convened on the last Wednesday of every month, on open invitation to gather with friends and strangers alike over a dinner cooked by a guest chef.
The jewel of their community crown though is the Cooking Matters program, which brings issues of food equity into the purview of what we consume, how we shop, and what we get to make for ourselves and our families. It’s a six-week series made available to low-income communities across the Bay Area on how to buy, cook and eat good food. Reaching 3,500 people each year and located within school programs, community centers, clinics, shelters, housing sites, and health centers, this free course covers nutrition as well as cooking skills. Anyone can volunteer to assist with this program – you just need an interest in food to apply. So, if you are looking for more meaning in your life, this might be the way to go.
What we eat matters. Food matters. To our bodies, to our minds. To the people around us – our neighbors, our communities. To those who grow, harvest it and distribute it. To the environment with which we’re in a Faustian pact to produce it. On every level and in every way, though we often take each of these aspects for granted, food matters. 18 Reasons is the perfect corrective to our narrow way of approaching food; it tells all the stories that there are around it, many in ways that we’ve yet to hear but so badly need to.
To find out more: Website www.18reasons.org / Twitter @18reasons / Instagram @18reasons / Facebook @18reasons
NB: If you are not local, take a look at Feed Your People: Big-Hearted Big Batch Gatherings and the Food We Gather Around, co-authored by the people at 18 Reasons.