What makes a good life in Camden? Here’s how we found out
This blog post has been written by Camden citizens Angela Tebe, Charise Garcia and Ray Kinsella, in collaboration with Michal Shinwell and Dominic Murphy at Camden Council and Dr Jesse Mears, data strategy consultant.
Tell us what you think about the framework, and if you’re interested in learning more about it, and how it could improve your impact, contact the Good Life Camden team on goodlifecamden@camden.gov.uk
Everyone deserves to live a good life in Camden. But what does a good life actually mean to the people who live here? And how will we know if people are living well?
Those are the questions that a group of citizens from the borough have been answering with the Council since November 2022, and we’ve come up with a framework that describes and measures a good life for people in Camden — The Good Life Camden Wellbeing Measurement Framework.
The Journey
Since December 2022 a group of 20 Camden residents have been meeting regularly to develop the framework. Using the outputs from community events in 2022, involving more than 200 local people and some desk research, we workshopped ways of defining and measuring what a good life is to citizens of Camden. It was hard work — there were no right answers — but we worked together to produce something that resonated for everyone.
The Themes
We identified 9 key themes that made up a good life in Camden, including three core themes (in bold) that relate to all the six others:
Health
How our body and mind function contributes to living a good life. This includes physical and mental health
Safety
Personal and collective safety, being free from harm and feeling safe outside and at home
Equality
Feeling included and represented, and not being discriminated against. This is an intersectional theme which can include age, disability, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class and sexuality, as well as other protected characteristics
Housing
Having a home that provides good quality shelter, privacy, and safety
Environment
Having clean and green surroundings, including parks, roads, and nature. Being free from harmful pollution, such as in the air, water, sound and soil, and reducing our own impact on pollution
Income & Affordability
Having sufficient financial means to live a good life, including income and savings, and good quality jobs
Lifelong Learning
Acquiring knowledge and skills, including formal and informal education for all ages, as well as digital literacy and access
Social Connections & Community
Having good relationships with others, a sense of belonging, and a community, as well as not feeling lonely
Empowered Citizenship
Being active in decision-making and empowering people to be active in their community, including voting, citizen participation and volunteering
Health, equality and safety are at the core because they overlap with the other themes.
For example, equality showed up for us in all the other themes, and was important enough to us to be a theme of its own. Take the theme of environment; improving our environment to support a good life would mean encouraging people in Camden to use clean modes of transport where they can. How does this intersect with equality? One of our citizens with a disability helped us to understand that it’s important that people with mobility issues are not disproportionately negatively impacted by the interventions put in place to achieve this.
Thanks to the range of experiences of the citizens involved in the process we were able to create a framework that could accommodate lots of different needs and experiences — disabled people living with visible and invisible disabilities, older people, (single) parents and carers, people with English as a second language, different ethnicities and religions, and people in and out of work.
The Signals
For each of the themes we have thought about what we would want to see change (we’ve called them the signals), and how we would measure them (the indicators).
We started off with a massive list of signals within each theme — when you think about it, there is so much that is important to the diverse population of a place like Camden! It was hard to narrow it down, but through a series of workshops we managed to prioritise what the key signals were. For example:
Theme (the area of life that’s important)
Safety
Signal (what we would see change)
Everyone in Camden feels safe
Measure (how we can measure the signal):
Perceptions of safety
Road traffic accidents
Crime rates on public transport
Theme
Income & Affordability
Signal
Everyone in Camden gets paid fairly
Measure
Share of people earning above London Living Wage
Share of people working and living in poverty
How you can use the framework
One of the citizens involved in developing this framework has already used it to help identify ways in which her community wellbeing programme could be making more of a difference. It’s opened her eyes to different areas of need, such as child poverty, inclusion, and safety, and had a direct impact on her plans and how her programme could help make life better for people in Camden.
We want the Council, its partners and organisations working in Camden to:
- Use this framework to make a difference in a way that matters to the citizens of Camden.
- Use it to measure what matters to people and see if you can make lives better.
- Build it into your accountability mechanisms so that your success is judged against the quality of people’s lives in Camden.
- Use the framework to help inform your objectives and activities based on what matters most to residents and use the measures to evaluate your impact.
What next
This is the first version of the framework — it’s far from perfect. It needs to be tested, stretched and re-drafted to represent Camden and its people even better. Please be a part of taking it forward and making it work to improve the lives of people living in Camden.
Tell us what you think about the framework, and if you’re interested in learning more about the framework and how it could improve your impact, contact the Good Life Camden team on goodlifecamden@camden.gov.uk
