Delivering on the Five Ways to Wellbeing

The Change Minds initiative can be conceptualised in terms of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, developed by the New Economics Foundation in 2008 and accepted as a useful codification of evidence-based actions that improve wellbeing.

Connect

• People connect with individuals in the past and present. They make friends, reducing life-threatening isolation which strengthens resilience.
• Change Minds includes very excluded people in the country’s heritage and creative community.

Keep Learning

• People acquire transferable skills and a certificate that can be used as a reference for employers. They contribute to the historic record, affirming personal worth and overcoming negative attitudes to education.
• As participants may be vulnerable the cases selected for research are people who show evidence of recovery and are suitable for tracing subsequent life stories.

Be Active

• People regularly attend workshops at a designated archive service, as well as going on a visit to a heritage site.
• Visits, exhibitions and public events are daunting prospects. Properly supported, people can achieve things they never thought possible.

Take Notice

• Research and creativity unlock curiosity, concentration and imagination in a demanding but safe way.
• Change Minds’ attentive intellectual, social, wellbeing and environmental experience, its reliable routine and time keeping gives people the security to risk trying new things.

Give

• Change Minds is explicitly person-centred, so participants are on the Project Board, lead public events and engage in most aspects of the project.
• Celebrations, exhibitions, digital outputs, oral histories and our book are gifts to families, friends, the community – and the future.