Connection in a lonely age: Vogl urges Culver Academies students to build community one invitation at a time

Community and connection expert Charles Vogl told Culver Academies students that they are living in the loneliest era known to man and the only way to change that is by actively working to connect with others.

“Up until this time, it was taken for granted that the loneliest people culturally are elderly because of their infirmities and losing friends to death makes them more lonely. That is no longer true. The reason this is relevant for you is you need to understand that broadly in our culture, our culture is not teaching our youth how to build the social skills they need to create the relationships they want to face the challenges of life,” he said. “Or said differently, you can't trust this culture and this time to give you the skills that you'll need.”

Vogl, visiting Culver as part of the Class of 1962 Student Enrichment Series, encouraged students to learn to use tools “to knit together relationships of mutual concern.”

“If you're doing things that help the people you care about and get together relationships with mutual concern, you're building a community that helps build resilience and adaptability,” he said.

Vogl has written three books, including the best-seller “The Art of Community.” He said he’s qualified to write about loneliness because he spent many years being alone and wondering if he’d ever make the kind of friends he wanted. He said when he arrived at Yale University to study religion and ethics he became convinced he didn’t belong there.

So he and his wife started hosting dinners to make friends. He said initially they drew a number of people, but eventually sometimes no one would show. Still, they continued. But eventually his dinners became so popular that “I made some of the most important friends of my life,” Vogl said.

He said these experiences illustrate that genuine community starts small and is shaped by everyday moments. Vogl said the term he came up with to describe the feeling of a large number of people feeling alone on a crowded campus as “a crisis of belonging.”

He told the students the simplest and most powerful tool for building community is an invitation. He said he’s not talking about an invitation to a big event. It can be as simple as an invitation to share dinner.

“An invitation in my work is a request to spend time when the person invited knows that somebody cares if they show up,” he said.

He said it doesn’t matter if people accept the invitation because you are telling them “they belong.”

He urged the students to begin “practicing simple invitations.”

“Because it may change the course of someone’s life,” he said.

Throughout his visit, Vogl took time to lead a student campfire experience with select junior and senior leaders and another campfire experience for Culver adults to model the practice and to equip students and adults with strategies to develop and support connections. At the end of his talk he sat for a 20-minute question-and-answer session with Katie Gao ’26 and Steve Gray ’26. Gao asked Vogl what a boarding school like Culver Academies, an elite leadership-oriented boarding school, can do to ensure a strong sense of community and not just function as an institution.

In a boarding school environment, it’s easy to assume community forms automatically, Vogl said. But physical closeness by eating in the same dining hall, studying in the same dorm and going to classes together is not enough to build what he calls non-transactional relationships, the resilient connections people can rely on during life’s most difficult moments.

Real community emerges only when people engage in experiences where nothing is being exchanged or earned, he said. These “campfire times,” must be intentionally created.

“If you are not scheduling that, you will not generate the relationships that you need that are durable and non-transactional when you face all the challenges that are coming,” he said.

Vogl closed with a practical challenge for the students: schedule at least two hours every week to spend with people you want to know better.

Fifty such gatherings a year, he said, will radically reshape a young person’s resilience, adaptability and community. Over two years, students who build this habit will accumulate “100 experiences knitting relationships that matter,” giving them the support necessary to withstand the inevitable crises of adulthood.

“The difference between a crisis being totally overwhelming and being a difficult chapter you look back on can be the difference of one friend,” Vogl said.