Longing for Belonging - with Ron Ivey and Monika Jiang (Part 1 of 2)

Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan talks to two experts combating our current loneliness crisis: Ron Ivey and Monika Jiang.

Ron Ivey is a writer, researcher, and strategic advisor to business, governments, and philanthropies with a focus on social trust, belonging, and human flourishing.  Ron is currently the Managing Director of the Humanity 2.0 Institute and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program where he co-leads the Trust and Belonging Initiative. Ron also currently serves as a Fellow at the Centre for Public Impact, a global think tank seeking to re-imagine government and restore relationships between governments and those they govern. In 2017, Ron established a consultancy, Rembrandt Collective, to shape business strategies for trust, alignment and social impact. 

Monika Jiang, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, has always walked the line between feeling estranged and belonging. Her journey, marked by oscillations between aloneness, loneliness, and connection, has profoundly influenced her personal and professional life, shaping her into a visionary who senses what wants to emerge as we move closer to ourselves, each other, and the world. Professionally, Monika has made a significant impact at the House of Beautiful Business. Here, she helped build a global community of 50,000 members dedicated to a life-centered economy. By curating and hosting transformative gatherings, she helped business leaders imagine and transform themselves and their environments. Monika’s deep desire to move from loneliness to oneliness inspired her to found the initiative Sharing Our Loneliness. This initiative aims to raise awareness about the paradoxical power of loneliness to reconnect us with ourselves and others. She is a teacher in training with Humanize, an evidence-based program focused on fostering emotional and social skills, and she practices these skills based on social neuroscientific research at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin. 

In this episode we talk about: 

1. Loneliness and growing up in a multicultural environment 
2. How the experience of shared loneliness can actually bring us closer together
3. Current research on loneliness and social cohesion and the blind spots in policies
4. Cross-cultural differences in loneliness
5. The surprising beauty that can be found within our experience of loneliness

To learn more about Monika’s work, you can find her at:
Website: https://www.monikajiang.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monika.jiang/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monika-jiang/ 

To learn more about Ron’s work, you can find him at:
X: https://x.com/ronivey
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monika.jiang/ 
Linkedin: https://fr.linkedin.com/in/ron-ivey-0bb9a33

This episode is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/) and
the Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

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