Our North Star: Wellbeing
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
This is a post from Keren Tang (Participatory City Development Manager with the McConnell Foundation) and Sue Holdsworth (RECOVER Urban Wellbeing Project Manager). They both participated in the Policies for Better Lives Conference about big, bold health and social policies that improve wellbeing. Various A-HA moments during the conference brought the two together to collaborate on this blog.
This past May, the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy hosted an international conference called Policies for Better Lives. It was all about wellbeing - what makes a good wellbeing policy and how you can measure wellbeing. This really opened our eyes to the fact that there is a global wellbeing movement that is growing, and we are very much a part of it.
“There is a global wellbeing movement that is growing, and RECOVER Urban Wellbeing and Participatory Canada are very much a part of it.”
And there is not a better time to be thinking about this than now in our COVID context. There is talk about building back better - but what does this really mean? And how do we do this so that our individual and collective wellbeing is stronger? How do we embed equity, justice, dignity as well as prosperity into our systems as we recover from COVID?
So, here are few main take-aways:
Wellbeing is personal and subjective, but also universally relevant
Reducing wellbeing inequality should be the goal of society
Measuring wellbeing should be done using a ground up approach - asking people what matters to them and trying to measure those things
Subjective wellbeing matters - peoples’ own views and experiences matter - we each have stories to tell
Improving wellbeing can be a fundamental goal for individuals, communities and nations - recognizing the breadth of issues, the subjective nature and collective outcomes, breaking silos and creating a shared vision
From setting city-building goals for policy, to evaluating impact of city work, wellbeing can be the overarching goal and provide a shared vision for decision-making
We loved the sound of this. It resonated deeply with our work on RECOVER Urban Wellbeing and Participatory Canada. However, we know that there are many challenges. Current systems address wellbeing through an illness frame. They focus on services that address what is wrong and on needs. They don’t think nearly enough about the gifts that we all have to offer and how to facilitate or support community-led efforts. As Cormac Russell prods us… Imagine a future where every organization has an active policy to reduce dependence on their service by increasing interdependence in community life? This means:
Sharing power with communities and supporting a culture of sharing risks
Developing wellbeing literacy at the societal level with a shared understanding of the role we each play
Co-creating, co-designing, and co-producing things with each other in the public sphere, which in turn break down barriers and polarization, and build trust and empathy
“As part of this movement, there is a growing recognition of the role of infrastructure in shaping wellbeing - particularly social infrastructure that is inclusive, participatory, and people-centred. ”
As part of this movement, there is a growing recognition of the role of infrastructure in shaping wellbeing - particularly social infrastructure that is inclusive, participatory, and people-centred. This is evident in the rolling out of the oversubscribed Canada Healthy Communities Initiative grant program in 2021 that called on communities across the country to put forward ideas that can build pandemic-resilient spaces for now and into the future. Other research has identified that communities with animated public spaces for neighbours to interact organically and spontaneously have stronger wellbeing outcomes during and post-catastrophe.
Here in Edmonton, RECOVER Urban Wellbeing has developed its own wellbeing framework that aligns well with what we heard from presenters at the conference. We’ve also been prototyping various ideas in communities that might improve wellbeing - intentionally applying elements from the wellbeing framework. Soloss is one of them. A lot of the issues in public spaces in the downtown core are attributed to “social disorder”; however, we know from our research that many of the behaviours associated with “disorder” are expressions and symptoms of disenfranchised grief and loss. Soloss is a community-based solution facilitating peer-to-peer, neighbour-to-neighbour networks and relationships to bear witness to people’s experiences of grief and loss and co-create rituals and artifacts for healing. Curating these creations at a neighbourhood level brings disenfranchised grief to the fore, creating space for what was once hidden, for healing.
At the national level, Participatory Canada is an initiative that strives for wellbeing outcomes by fostering neighbour-to-neighbour learning and doing networks and relationships that invite the creativity of everyone and help re-imagine how we live and work together in our communities. The initiative just wrapped up a year of social research and development where three Canadian cities - Kjipuktuk-Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto - prototyped an approach to building inclusive participation in communities. Teams supported residents with tools to co-create projects with their neighbours, and discovered ways to center Indigenous reconciliation while being inclusive of everyone and to bring together people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Early promising results from the R&D highlight broader societal trends which are gaining momentum. They include:
redefining infrastructure so that we build to meet the increasing challenges of wellbeing;
strengthening collective capabilities so that we can think, learn and act together with wisdom; and
innovating financing in order to value what matters while building community wealth and a wellbeing economy.
The Participatory City Approach
The two initiatives highlight the intertwined nature of wellbeing and social infrastructure: when we co-create and build relationships together, we improve the wellbeing of all, regardless of socioeconomic status, racial and cultural differences. Moving forward, having a strong wellbeing framework or policy is going to make sure no one gets left behind as the Edmonton community and economy recovers from the fallout of the pandemic. Social infrastructure co-created with Edmontonians is ONE of many important paths forward. To get there, it won’t be easy and will involve taking more risks. But it will be worth it.
If this blog piqued your interest, then we recommend checking out the What Works Centre for Wellbeing out of the UK. They are an independent collaborating centre that develops and shares robust and accessible wellbeing evidence to improve decision making that is used by governments, businesses and communities.
Also, materials from the conference are available online here. These include time-tagged videos of all public sessions, as well as a report on the insights from the closed invitational session on May 21st.