Vanessa Elias helps people build relationships and community both within their home (Thrive with a Guide – Parent Coaching) and outside their home (Block Party USA). Vanessa is a human connection and mental health activist, certified parent coach, speaker, and writer featured in the WSJ, NPR, PBS, and in the NYT best seller Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It. She is the founder of Thrive with a Guide and serves as a parent support group facilitator for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

In 2023, she founded Block Party USA as a free and simple cure for our country’s loneliness, social isolation, divisiveness, and the youth mental health crisis. As part of Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s “Recipes for Connection” initiative, the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General features Block Party USA as a resource that supports building social connection through gathering. To help end the phone-based childhood and restore the play-based childhood, Block Party USA was named an Aligned Organization of Jonathan Haidt’s NYT best seller The Anxious Generation.

Vanessa is Chief Neighborhood Activator with the US Chamber of Connection and is a member of The Aspen Institute’s Weave Social Fabric Project Speakers Bureau.