Walk With Me, Week One: The First Steps

For months, we've been preparing to travel across the country to listen.

Walk With Me: A Journey Toward Connection is taking The Cost of Loneliness Project from California to New York, on foot and by car, through 45 cities and towns across 17 states. We want to understand how loneliness shows up in people's everyday lives, and to find the people, places and traditions already helping others feel connected.

We are setting out with questions. We want to hear people's own experiences, see what is working in different communities, and learn from the people already building connection, whether or not they'd describe their work that way.

On Thursday, Sept. 17 we were in Venice Beach. By Sunday night, we had heard stories we won't soon forget.

The day before

Before taking the first official steps, we spent Thursday getting to know Venice Beach and inviting people into the conversation.

We set up a table near the beach with a mailbox and one prompt: write a note to someone you miss. Then we wandered down to the pier, past the Ferris wheel and the ocean and all the noise and life around us, and mostly, we talked to people.

Some were curious about what we were doing. Some stopped to write a note. Others started telling us about people they missed, or about times loneliness had shown up in their own lives.

It was an early glimpse of what we hoped this journey would bring. Give people an opening to talk about loneliness and connection, and they often have something deeply personal to share.

That was the spirit we carried into Friday morning.

Day 1: Venice Beach to Pasadena

We officially began Walk With Me on Friday, Sept. 18, with nearly 100 people joining us for a community walk along the beach to the pier.

We wanted the journey to begin with people, and what happened meant more than we expected. As we walked, people started opening up.

We heard about feeling lonely while surrounded by others. About friendships that had faded, relationships people wanted to strengthen, and stretches of life when meaningful connection felt out of reach. Some came because they had lived with loneliness themselves. Others had watched someone they love struggle with it.

People who had never met were walking side by side and talking about things most of us keep private. For a few hours, a group of mostly strangers started to feel a little like a community.

Walking with us that morning were Ben Nemtin, Jesse Israel, Seb Terry and Kevin Hekmat, four friends who live near one another in Venice and have each built work around purpose, vulnerability, mindfulness, mental health and human connection.

Their friendship is what stayed with us. They were friends before any of this became professional work, and they've built their lives around staying close and making room for real conversation. They gave us one of the first questions we carried onto the road: what changes when we treat friendship as something worth designing our lives around?

Later, we spent time with Kyleigh Belle Butler, the teenager behind Belle's Moments. Kyleigh saw how much isolation older adults can experience and decided to do something about it. Her work brings teenagers and seniors together through visits, activities and conversation, building relationships between two generations that have a great deal to offer each other.

Watching someone so young notice a need in her community and act on it was one of the first examples of exactly what we hope to find along this route.

By evening, we had made our way from the coast toward Pasadena, carrying more stories than we expected to hear on Day 1.

Day 2: Pasadena to Monrovia

Saturday showed us a very different side of connection.

Pasadena is home to one of the country's best-known community traditions, the Rose Parade. That weekend, we found more traditions bringing people together in their own ways.

Our first stop was the South Pasadena Moon Festival, co-sponsored by the City of South Pasadena and the South Pasadena Chinese-American Club. Library Park was full of families, neighbors, food, music and people celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival together.

There we met South Pasadena Mayor Sheila Rossi. Our conversation moved past festivals and into something we'll be thinking about for the rest of this journey: how the places where we live can encourage connection or quietly work against it. She talked about designing neighborhoods, residential streets and public spaces so people have more chances to see one another, gather and talk.

It gave us a new way to think about all of this. Reaching out takes courage, and the right surroundings can make it far more likely to happen.

Later, we made our way to the Pasadena Greek Festival, where Vicki Kades, the festival's community communications coordinator, gave us a tour full of food, culture and conversation.

She also taught us a word: philotimo.

There's no perfect English translation. It holds honor, generosity, hospitality and a sense of responsibility toward others. At its heart is the idea that you show up for the people around you because that is who you are.

After a day of watching two communities gather around food and traditions handed down through generations, it felt like exactly the right word.

We finished Saturday with a sunset walk toward Monrovia.

Day 3: Monrovia to Glendora

By Sunday, we noticed connection growing somewhere closer to home: within our own team.

We started with breakfast together at Jake's Roadhouse in downtown Monrovia. The first two days had been full. We were meeting people, filming conversations, moving from place to place and trying to take it all in.

Sunday gave us hours together on foot, and when you walk that long beside someone, you talk. We swapped stories and learned things about one another we didn't know three days earlier. Walk With Me is about meeting people across the country, and it is also changing how our own team connects.

All day, we kept running into different examples around us.

Members of our team met Bridgette Glover White and a group of local children running a roadside lemonade stand to raise money for an organization that supports children and families through mental health and foster care services. A group of kids, spending part of their Sunday helping other kids.

Along the San Gabriel River Trail, we passed through Duarte, known as the City of Health, and stopped for a break in a park full of birthday parties, families eating together and friends spending the afternoon with one another. The people there were doing the ordinary things that build connection, without anyone calling it that.

From there we continued through Azusa and walked into Glendora.

What we're starting to notice

It's far too early to declare what more we've learned about chronic loneliness in America, and we're in no hurry to. We are starting to notice some things.

Connection often begins when someone creates a reason for people to show up.

A walk along the beach.
A cultural festival.
A neighborhood park.
A friendship people make room for.
A teenager bringing two generations together.
A lemonade stand.
A few hours walking beside someone with nowhere else to be.

In three days we've seen connection happen at very different scales and in very different ways. Maybe that's what this journey will teach us: connection has thousands of starting points.

We’ve got a lot of ground ahead and a lot of people we haven't met yet. We'll keep walking, and we'll keep listening.

If there's someone we should meet along the way, or a place in your community where people already come together, tell us.

And on Nov. 12, join us for the first National Day of Connection. At noon, take 12 minutes with someone you want to know better.