LONELY-EU Policy Brief No. 1
Key findings
- LONELY-EU formally launched its Evidence-to-Action (E2A) Board in November 2025. The Board stays active for the full duration of the Horizon Europe project.
- The E2A Board brings researchers, policymakers, and practitioners together so that evidence on social isolation and loneliness can be used to design, monitor, and evaluate policy.
- The Board reviews the measurement categories, indicators, and assumptions proposed for an EU-wide framework to monitor social isolation and loneliness, checking that they are comparable and usable for policy monitoring.
- Feedback from the E2A Board is advisory and does not bind the researchers. Members work in plenary meetings and targeted subgroups, and their contributions are documented in later project outputs.
- The brief finds that data on loneliness and social isolation in Europe are fragmented and measured differently across countries and populations, so policymakers often have to act on incomplete evidence.
Executive summary
This policy brief introduces the Evidence-to-Action (E2A) Board of LONELY-EU. The E2A Board brings together researchers, policymakers and practitioners to ensure that evidence on social isolation and loneliness is usable for policy design, monitoring and evaluation. It operates as a structured feedback mechanism throughout the project, allowing policy considerations to inform research choices, and research findings to inform policy decisions. The Board supports the development of a European monitoring framework and future policy recommendations at EU, national and local level.
How to cite
Judith Merkies (2026). Kick-starting the Dialogue: The Evidence-to-Action Board in LONELY-EU. LONELY-EU Policy Brief No. 1 Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18786451
