Reflections on the Flourishing Fellowship
Background
I am curious in the way in which our values and assumptions influence how we act and how we make decisions. I hold a core value around integrity, which to me means having a set of clear intentions and ethical reasoning for doing so. You can thank a decade of working in healthcare and being governed by a set of ethical standards, and although straightforward in theory, fraught with complexity in practice.
At Lifehack, core to my role is having an in depth understanding across methods deployed throughout the project, from back office functions through to the codesign of programmes — I’m most interested in the codesign of our programmes.
This curiosity of the how and why of Lifehack’s work has landed me here, writing this post about the key insights generated by Lifehack’s second long-version programme, the Flourishing Fellowship.
Introduction
Part of Lifehack’s ongoing strategy is to build a series of wellbeing ambassadors, who, in their own regions have the agency and tools to influence positive social change, while being part of a larger community of interconnected humans all who want to positively influence the complex and systemic drivers of wellbeing in Aotearoa.
The Flourishing Fellowship was the first of Lifehack’s experiments within this strategic flow. With a modest budget we co-designed a three-month programme that enabled participants to tool up and connect. [Read more about how we codesigned the programme here]
Twenty-two New Zealanders aged between 18–45 from across the country came together in retreat spaces and connected online through platforms such as Slack and Loomio to build relationships with one another, to build new youth wellbeing projects and collaborate on existing ones.
This programme was multifaceted — there is no way one can apply just one lens or evidence base to how we went about the codesign, nor delivery. The evidence which guided our experiments was spread across these six concepts below. If you are interested in how we used experiments to drive insight, you can read more here.
As with all of Lifehack’s programmes, the Flourishing Fellowship included elements of these six components. We created our own codesign approach which enabled us to uncover new learnings and co-created a highly-tailored programme that is based in reality — not based on assumptions.
The best way we’ve come to think about this complex nest of evidence-base influences is to liken Lifehack to a tree. Our roots are in design and there are many parts of the trunk that represent different, and very important aspects of our method. The sum of each part of the trunk is the tree, and similarly to the work we do, the tree belongs to a wider ecosystem of forests. In this Medium post, I’m going to focus in on how Lifehack uses a wellbeing-science evidence base to support individuals and initiatives.
Programme Design
It’s difficult to identify all of the systemic drivers that influences an individual’s wellbeing in one swoop. This is why we deliberately chose to use Theory U as a framing that enabled people to research, explore and connect with their internal motivations for influencing change in New Zealand’s wellbeing landscape. Theory U provided a blueprint in which we could design a social process that would adequately hold a participant as they engaged in a series of light-bulb moments and onwards through to using those epiphanies as fuel to prototype solutions in response to complex societal issues.
Through our programme design, we gave participants a number of opportunities to connect with their motivation to create positive change in Aotearoa. Examples of individuals motivation to enact change included:
- Enabling other people opportunities that they were denied as a young person.
- Attending to the current-day impacts that the atrocities against Māori from colonisation in the 1800s.
- Improving systems that are ill-fitting to the needs of young people, such as the justice system.
We invited people to consider their position from multiple lenses through a series of activities and questions which they conducted in their own communities, that:
- Built a personal narrative of their individual experience.
- Sought to understand the experience of others.
- Explored current literature both in NZ and overseas.
- Connected with others who had a similar area of interest.
- In-depth comprehension of the systems that influence that area of interest.
Many participants had light bulb moments, at differing parts of their journey, we witnessed people realising that they do have the agency to make change through their plethora of existing skillsets and solid relationships.
One of the sessions led by Carsten Grimm (formerly Mental Health Foundation) invited participants to delve deep into New Zealand’s current state of the nation through a wellbeing science lens. Through this session, we heard that amongst young people, one out of every six young females and one out of every twelve males showed significant depressive symptoms. With a staggering 29.1 per cent of girls harmed themselves deliberately in 2008.
Participants told us that Carsten’s workshop was incredibly useful in understanding more about the role that wellbeing science plays in addresses systemic societal change.
Wellbeing Science in Programme Design
The Lifehack team maintained the concept of wellbeing throughout the programme design and delivery. We incorporated aspects like morning yoga and nourishing organic food into everyday life while on hui (a hui is a Māori word for in-person gathering). Our overarching programme was designed to enable people to continue engaging in life’s everyday challenges, while chipping away at the tasks associated with this programme which we were hoping would enable participants to maintain a sense of wellbeing through not feeling over committed with the programme.
The experience of being amongst a group of individuals all working on wellbeing has been something that the Fellows continue to cherish and grow. As a result of the Fellowship we have seen six new initiatives grow and 20,850 number of young people reached as well as the inaugural Lifehack Community Retreat.
Shift: Wellbeing science in action
One example of a project that arose out of the Flourishing Fellowship is Shift. It’s an initiative that is deeply connected to the 5 Ways to Wellbeing (a holistic framework for fostering wellbeing in individuals, adapted by the New Zealand’s Mental Health Foundation from the research done by the New Economics Foundation in the UK).
The Shift project is specifically looking at the connection between young people increasing their physical activity and the potential to lead more fulfilled, flourishing lives. Shift was nurtured in its early stages through Lifehack’s Flourishing Fellowship (and later Te Koānga), where project lead Fran learnt a great amount about herself as well as the systemic levers that can influence positive change in a young person’s life.
In 2015 Michigan State University published a paper which illustrated the vast array of things that contributes to (and reinforces) depressive episodes. You can see in the illustration below the interdependence and influence that physical activity can have upon a person’s wellbeing, from the hormonal and neurological connections, right through to how we process cognitions.
If we go back to the systems diagram by Wittenborn et al, we see that physical activity directly influences an individual’s:
- Physical health
- Chronic illness
- Ability to cope with early adverse experiences
- Ability to attend to stress
If participants in the Shift programme are able to participate in more physical exercise, they are already engaging in an intervention that acts as a protective factor against experiences like untreated depression. Not only does physical activity influence the aforementioned factors, but the activities are conducted alongside others and thus increasing the number of human connections participants have in their lives. It is this social connection that many people view as integral to being able to lead a flourishing life. Protective factors can be best described through the illustration below:
Conclusion
Throughout the Fellowship, we explored questions like ‘what role does technology play in wellbeing?’ ‘how does colonisation impact tangata te whenua today?’ and we came to know that there are no quick answers, so we’ll continue asking these questions and prototyping solutions alongside people in our communities in Aotearoa.
These questions and many others unlocked new ways of thinking for Fellows, sparking new ideas which saw the birth of new projects and initiatives that directly improve the lives of young New Zealanders.
If you are interested in reading more in depth about the programme design you can download the Participatory Co-Design Guide here and the Flourishing Fellowship Report here.
Follow Lifehack on Twitter, using #flouriship to chat with us about your thoughts of the role of wellbeing science in programme design.
You can find out more about Shift by visiting their Facebook page.
