Our story

Dr. Joseph Allen has dedicated his life's work to understanding what key factors in adolescence can profoundly change outcomes later in life. Dr. Allen's VIDA project, a study that began in 1998 and continues to this day, has collected information from not only the study's participants, but also their friends, family, and romantic relationships over decades of life, and among many findings, one thing became clear - friendship matters. You probably do not need a lifelong psychological study to recognize how true that simple fact is. Friendship, of course, matters in a deeply personal way - Dr. Allen often reflects on a summer camp experience he had in high school that transformed his own social world - but beyond that, the VIDA project was able to show that friendship matters in ways that may seem unexpected. Dr. Allen and his team noticed the positive relationships between strong connections and support in predicting academic and professional outcomes, as well as mental and physical ones. The negative physical impacts of loneliness were similarly shocking. This begged the question - can we find a way to facilitate these positive outcomes and protect against these negative ones? Can an intervention be made that facilitates true, life-changing connection?

In 2012, an effort to create such an intervention, called The Connection Project, began. The team behind the VIDA project began working with the Wyman Center to develop a 12-14 week long intervention that had groups of high schoolers meet weekly with a trained facilitator. Tested both at a school in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at schools in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri as a means to both foster connections with peers and to enhance the academic experience of marginalized youth. A rigorous randomized controlled study, based on a sample of 610 adolescents, showed that this iteration of the The Connection Project, called the Teen Connection Project, resulted in significant improvements in the quality of participants' peer relationships (I.e. use of social support to cope), increased academic engagement, and lower levels of depressive symptoms. The Wyman Center continues to run the Teen Connection Project, now having done a national replication of the original study. 

On the university level, the impact of loneliness on student outcomes, combined with the challenge of having enough therapeutic support for the proportion of the student population in need made a college adaptation of The Connection Project a natural next step. When the Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) center at The Connection Project's home, the University of Virginia, reached out about the possibility of a college level intervention, the team got to work. The program was first piloted among a small group of students connected to Dr. Allen's lab, leading to initial revisions and improvements to make it more applicable to college-aged students. From Fall 2018 to Spring 2021, more groups were run with students from the larger UVA population and the team behind this new iteration, called Hoos Connected,  collected data to ensure that all of those wonderful outcomes from the teen version held up. Turns out, they did! Hoos Connected now serves about 1,000 students each year from all years, which courses dedicated to training facilitators and running small groups.

Our goal now? To spread The Connection Project to other universities!  Click here to see how you can get TCP on your campus