Community Well-being, Learning & Development

Our approach to well-being is firmly rooted in community development principals - empowerment, human rights, inclusion, social justice, self-determination and collective action. We believe that community members are the experts in their own lives and their communities, and we value this community knowledge and wisdom. 

 

It is this collective knowledge and wisdom that informs our relationship with the community, not as experts, but as facilitators of meaningful, positive change. Moreover, our understanding of well-being goes beyond simple definitions.

 

Well-being is more than just having good mental and physical health. It is about living life to the fullness of your ability, it is about caring and compassionate community, it is about giving and gratitude and understanding that we all share this planet. It is about our right as human beings to flourish on our own terms, as individuals and collectively as communities and society. 

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Whilst we recognise that community development theory and practice has been largely derived from sociology and social policy, we have found that an understanding and application of psychology to community development work greatly enhances the effectiveness of these more traditional approaches. 

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Our approach to community wellbeing development is a synthesis of Asset Based Community Development, Transformational Social Learning and Positive Psychology, particularly the PERMA model, which enables us to build psychosocial capacity by tapping in to the core strengths of the community individually and collectively. We call our approach Positive Community Development (PCD).

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Fundamental to our approach is community education based on the social pedagogy of Pablo Freire. Our Transformational Social Learning (TSL) empowers the community to take charge of their wellbeing needs through situational appraisal and reflective practice, which provides a deep understanding of socio-political structures and economic realities in order to facilitate realistic problem-solving and achieve an appropriate response.

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Nothing can be achieved in isolation and with this in mind we work with the community to build strong and sustainable networks and partnerships for Co-production that can serve to maximise service provision, funding and finance. Participatory budgeting may be used to develop a detailed understanding of where the money goes within the community and provide the community with an opportunity to participate in the decision making process with regards to where public money is spent and what it should be spent on within the community. 

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Our community facilitation process also promotes key eudemonic well-being activities such as giving and forgiving, acknowledging and savouring what is good about life, being in the moment and staying active within all aspects of our work with communities. Our core aim is the help communities to become sustainable, cohesive and resilient.