There are social wounds that cannot be healed with medicine.
Unwanted loneliness is one of them. It is not always visible, but it is felt in empty streets, in silent doorways, in homes where time passes without witnesses. In response, CENIE has promoted a simple and transformative solution: community action as a tool to prevent isolation and restore to older people their right to companionship, participation, and a sense of belonging.
In 2025, the SOLiEDAD project, led by Elisa Sala and driven by the University School of Nursing in Zamora, has continued to consolidate itself as a living and expanding experience, capable of uniting scientific research, civic commitment, and intergenerational action. What began as a pilot study has become a model of a caring community, recognized for its methodological rigor and social impact.
From research to action
The project was born with a clear hypothesis: unwanted loneliness is not resolved with care resources, but with meaningful presence and sustained bonds.
From its first edition, the research directed by Elisa Sala showed that preventing isolation depends less on large institutional systems and more on the ability of territories to reconnect with themselves: neighbors who recognize each other, young people who get involved, professionals who accompany.
The research team, made up of teachers, nurses, social workers, and students, maintained in 2025 a constant dynamic of citizen participation in Zamora, extending its methodology to rural and urban environments. The study demonstrated that networks of trust and support — woven locally — reduce risk factors associated with chronic loneliness and improve the emotional and functional health of older people.
What the data say… and what life teaches
The results of the 2024 Barometer of Unwanted Loneliness confirm it: one in five people in Spain (21.5%) suffers from unwanted loneliness, and 11.8% live with prolonged chronic loneliness.
Among people over 65, isolation doubles in those who live alone or suffer from mental health problems. Loneliness, the report notes, does not depend only on the number of relationships, but on their quality: the lack of meaningful relationships triples the risk of feeling lonely.
In this context, SOLiEDAD has become a living laboratory of intervention, focused on transforming information into community action. Through workshops, home visits, conversation groups, and intergenerational volunteer networks, the project has shown that constant — not episodic — accompaniment changes the perception of well-being and belonging.
Zamora: pioneering territory
The University School of Nursing in Zamora has been the cornerstone of the project.
From there, an intergenerational group has been trained and coordinated, linking nursing students, health professionals, and older people in the community. Their work has inspired new vocations, new networks, and a new understanding of care.
“Every conversation can be a preventive act,” summarizes Elisa Sala. Under this conviction, the School consolidated in 2025 a stable model of service-learning, in which students apply in practice the principles of community nursing and relational health: listening, observing, accompanying, building trust.
The project has transcended the health field to become a social movement: neighbors who become neighborhood mediators, young people who accompany older people to cultural activities, associations that rediscover their role as agents of well-being.
A recognized experience
The SOLiEDAD approach is fully aligned with the State Strategy for a New Model of Community Care (2024–2030), which calls for the need to move from assistentialism to community prevention and networked living.
In this sense, the Zamora project has been recognized as an exemplary experience of preventive deinstitutionalization, showing that local action can anticipate national policies.
Moreover, the continuity of the program during 2025 has made it possible to maintain a longitudinal database on perceptions of well-being, participation habits, and emotional evolution of the people accompanied. These data will be integrated in 2026 into the OLAS Observatory of CENIE, strengthening its social and community component.
Community as antidote
If loneliness is a symptom, community is the medicine.
Elisa Sala has expressed it on more than one occasion: “Caring is not only attending; it is sharing presence, listening to silences, sustaining gazes.”
This philosophy, which combines scientific precision with professional tenderness, has inspired a new group of students who see in community nursing a way to transform realities, not just treat them.
Thanks to the continued drive of the Zamora School of Nursing, the project has grown without losing its essence: closeness. Each participating neighborhood has become a space of coexistence where loneliness ceases to be an inevitable destiny and becomes a common cause.
A legacy that multiplies
SOLiEDAD has not only generated measurable results, but also a cultural change.
It has shown that preventing isolation does not depend on large structures, but on small shared decisions.
That care does not belong exclusively to professionals, but also to citizens.
And that research, when rooted in the territory, can change the way a society relates to itself.
For all these reasons, CENIE recognizes this project as one of its Highlights of the Year 2025: for turning science into connection, loneliness into opportunity, and community into hope.