A note from the founding team

Human connection is being explored and reshaped clinically, technologically, artistically, spiritually, educationally, and from every direction at once, and almost none of those directions talk to each other. A therapist studying attachment, a filmmaker studying intimacy on a screen, a teacher building a curriculum for students to connect and thrive across neurodiversities, a technologist designing how AI can handle high-stakes topics of mental health, suicide, and health education. The social worker taking on the world in all the ways they know, like finding housing for communities, case managing for seamless services and better wellbeing, affecting policy and advocating for rights. All of this is the same work, and no institutions treat it this way.

Public health leaders have named disconnection and loneliness a defining crisis of this era. The response so far has been fragmented for a structural reason. There is no lack of effort, as people are establishing new forms of human connection all the time. However, there is a lack of validation and recognition that this is a very real way to connect with people. Every institution working on some piece of human connection is built to do exactly one thing, in exactly one medium. It is not a failure of any one organization to focus on one path, but communicating what that path is within the broader domain of human connection is a gap that only something built to hold all mediums at once can fill.

Some of the topics under this umbrella are, and can be: sex, sexuality, and other stigmatized forms of intimacy defined as closeness get less institutional support than most because the subject is treated as risky to touch. Any organization taking on human connection broadly has to hold these topics with the same seriousness as the more comfortable ones, or the claim to cover the breadth of human connection falls short. We share this facet of human connection because there is nothing that is too stigmatized to explore. This is to share a version of the extreme within the umbrella of human connection – an extreme we intend to tackle and have made a career out of being curious toward.

A Quaint Think Tank exists to be a deliberately wide-reaching body that treats human connection as one coherent subject, explorable through any medium a person, organization, or entity is equipped with to explore.