What Works Centre for Wellbeing: Call out for stakeholder engagement

Guest blogger Hannah Wheatley from the Wellbeing Team within the New Economics Foundation introduces the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, recently launched by the What Works Network as a government-funded initiative aiming to enable a range of stakeholders to access evidence on wellbeing.

The What Works Network has recently launched the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, a government-funded initiative aiming to enable a range of stakeholders to access evidence on wellbeing.

In 2011, the Office for National Statistics began measuring wellbeing across the UK, and there is a growing movement to consider wellbeing as a key outcome of policy and service delivery. The question now is how to use the data, and other evidence on wellbeing, to create better policies and practices. The new What Works Centre for Wellbeing aims to answer this question, bringing together robust evidence of what works and undertaking a knowledge mobilisation function to get that evidence to those areas and organisations that can use it to best effect.

One strand of this work will focus on Community Wellbeing. Over the next three years, the consortium, spanning five universities and five civil society groups, will be bringing together evidence on what community-level factors determine wellbeing. For example, how community wellbeing is affected by issues such as local social networks, having a say over what happens in our community, and local living conditions.

Where you come in

 
In the coming months we will be organising events and engaging with stakeholders in order to frame the scope of our research. We want to connect with a range of people, both whose work could be supported by wellbeing evidence and whose work could create wellbeing evidence. We want to understand what kinds of questions stakeholders would like the evidence to help answer.

We are organising a series of workshops across the UK, aiming to build closer links between researchers and evidence-users, including one in Scotland on 17th of September, in Glasgow.

These workshops will be used to collaboratively shape the scope of our enquiry to ensure that we produce outputs which are usable, relevant and robust.
If you are interested in being involved in this collaborative process, please email whatworkswellbeing@neweconomics.org or click here.

For more information about Community Wellbeing:
http://whatworkswellbeing.org/evidence-program/community-wellbeing/
Email: whatworkswellbeing@neweconomics.org