Society is challenged by a growing number of ageing people that live longer and age in place. We also see a gaining group of elderly living alone and not receiving support from family, friends or neighbours (Putman et al, 2016). The lack of supportive relationships combined with an increasing need of support leads not only to a decrease in empowerment, but also to an increase of feelings of loneliness. Loneliness is a heterogenic problem. Many interventions have been developed to address loneliness. It is though hard to select a suitable intervention in an unique situation. It depends, for example, on the type of loneliness and the motivation to participate socially. Concurrently service providers, organizations, and the whole society are expected to make the transition to community-based services. This has an impact on the different roles professionals must play. The transition to an inclusive society, forces service providers from different fields to cooperate and learn from each other. Also, the rapidly changing society requires from professionals generic skills & attitude to function in & contribute to the future society. These are so-called 21st century skills: problem solving thinking & performing, self-regulation, collaborating, ICT-skills, and creative thinking & performing. Education nowadays, is more focused on skills & competencies than on knowledge. Innovation is going too fast and knowledge quickly becomes out-of-date. So, students learn how to search for and create knowledge. Most of the 21st century skills have been integrated in the curricula of VET, as the skills are specifically mentioned in the curricula (analyses on the implementation of 21st century skills at the request of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (2016)). However, putting these skills into practice remains difficult. Due to the complexity of loneliness it is not easy for professionals to identify suitable interventions and to implement them. Professionals (to be) find it hard to diagnose each unique situation and to start the appropriate actions. They need to know which interventions can be implemented to alleviate loneliness, what their role is in implementing it and what the required skills are to carry it out. Hence, we want to exchange good practices for the innovation of approaches of social inclusion, with the aim of improving the skills and competencies of students (mainly VET, but also higher education) and professionals. Many European policy priorities are related to the integration of social and (mental) health services, ‘elderly friendly communities’ (see e.g. European Innovation partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing). In this sense it is important to cooperate transnationally with different EU countries in order to translate these policies to their national operation.Secondly, it is important to move forward. Having arranged it well at a national level is not enough. One needs to cooperate transnationally and share good practices. In this way one is able to find out what methods to address loneliness (including necessary skills and competences) are generic and which ones are context specific. In order to do something about the problem loneliness, it is necessary to involve all relevant stakeholders. So, the starting point of the FILO project was to involve education, practice, policymakers and the elderly themselves. This way all different perspectives, knowledge and experiences were combined.In the FILO project several good practices have been defined. Within these good practices the content of the intervention, the role of professionals to implement and the skills to carry the intervention out have been evaluated. The evaluation of the good practices resulted in an overview of interventions for alleviating loneliness, success and fail factors of good practices, and recommendations for education to improve the curricula as well as recommendations for organisations working with elderly and policymakers of cities and regions.More information about the project can be found at the FILO website: www.rotterdamuas.com/filo