The Team

Kim Samuel
Founder, Chief Belonging Officer

Kim Samuel is a leading voice in the global movement for belonging.  She is the author of On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation (Abrams Press 2022), an exploration of the crisis of social isolation and humanity’s right to belong. She is also the founder of the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness (SCSC), a research, advocacy, and action group that partners with and convenes leading academics and changemakers to combat social isolation and build belonging around the world. In 2024, she launched the Belonging Forum, a new solutions-focused initiative that completed a groundbreaking study on the state of belonging in the United Kingdom, drawing on survey data from 10,000 participants. 

Kim is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. She regularly lectures at institutions including Oxford, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, and she created and taught a first-of-its-kind course in the study of social isolation at McGill University.  

Kim’s work is built on the idea that belonging isn’t just a human need, but a birthright. Drawing on more than 20 years of research, she works to advance an understanding of belonging that is grounded in 4 P’s: people, place, power, and purpose. This is to say that belonging comes through our relationships with other people as well as through our rootedness in nature, our ability to influence social, political, and economic decision-making, and our capacity to find shared meaning and purpose in our lives. 

Kim serves on the steering committee of the Together Coalition in the United Kingdom, the executive committee and board of Special Olympics International, and the disability rights advisory committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a frequent commentator in outlets including the Times of London,  The Globe and Mail, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Boston Globe, USA Today, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Psychology Today, and she has been a guest on more than a dozen podcasts or broadcast shows. 

Katherine Janson
Director of Communications

Julia Pinchuk
Research Coordinator

Olivia Smith-Rodrigues
Program Manager
Social Connectedness Fellowships