Our Wellbeing Framework

 

Soulful City

Cities are more than concrete and steel, monuments and infrastructure. 

Cities are people, communities and relationships. Based on research, we’ve learned that healthy communities and happy people need connections to and relationships with family, friends, community, nature, the cosmos, one’s purpose, and one’s higher self. 

While material things, like shelter and food, are, of course, important, we’ve learned that non-material things, like respect, family/connection, and purpose are just as necessary in order to live well. 

 

The wellbeing framework.

 

“We have seen how prioritizing immediate needs over deeper ones can steadily erode people's potential.”

~ Dr. Sarah Schulman and Gord Tulloch, The Trampoline Effect

 These realizations have shaped our work over the past three years. In 2020, as a means of synthesizing our learnings, and revisiting and revising our assumptions, we asked: 

  • What do we mean by wellness and wellbeing?

  • What contributes to it?

  • What does it take to improve it? 

These big questions inspired us to work together with our ethnographers, social design firm InWithForward, to sift through all our research and learnings from previous years and put together a wellbeing framework to guide us in our future work. 

The resulting document, The Soulful City, is a deep dive that examines what we really mean by urban wellness and wellbeing. It combines the stories and lived experiences of street-involved Edmontonians, and draws on their wisdom about what wellbeing means through their eyes. It also pulls together cultural and philosophical teachings from around the world, and from Indigenous Peoples, to provide a deep understanding of how wellbeing is achieved. 

We have also worked with the Indigenous consulting firm, Naheyawin, to examine Indigenous traditions and practices that enhance wellbeing, in order to better integrate Western and Indigenous ideas as in Two-Eyed Seeing.

A Guide to the Wellbeing Framework (PDF)

 

The Soulful City - Executive Summary (PDF)

 

The Soulful City - Full Report (PDF)