Alex Smith founded The Cares Family and was CEO from 2011 until 2023. Under his leadership, the organization brought together 30,000 older and younger people to reduce loneliness and attitudinal polarization and to build solidarity across generations in times of change. Through this role, Smith helped shape the world’s first government-level loneliness strategy which was launched by the former UK Prime Minister at a Cares Family event.
Smith was an inaugural Obama Fellow in 2018 and is now Senior Development Advisor, Europe, at the Obama Foundation. In 2023, he spoke at the Foundation’s Democracy Forum on the topic ‘Finding Meaningful Connections In A Digital Age,’ which was streamed around the world, and his work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Economist, BBC News, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Chicago Tribune and other media around the world.
As a visiting Fellow, Smith will work to aggregate evidence and demonstrate the impact of intergenerational work to reduce loneliness. He will also interview key players in the movement he helped lead to inspire businesses, government, civil society, communities, and individuals in the UK to take action to reduce loneliness, publishing learning about a critical decade of impact. Finally, he will engage with the HKS community to share his research and experiences in the causes of loneliness, its effects, and promising solutions on what has been described in the US, UK and around the world as ‘one of the great challenges of our time.’
