State of Life

What really makes our life happier and healthier or perhaps more importantly just less miserable? Here it is - years of work in one big picture. Where’s WELLBY? This poster is a guide to a happier and healthier life. It’s not an exhaustive list but an attempt to capture in one place those things that really matter and how they compare in value and importance. It's a uniquely useful guide to help individuals, organisations and even nations prioritise their investment of time, energy and funding. Working in wellbeing for nearly 10 years we were waiting for someone to do this. No-one did. So we made a start and got it illustrated with suitable skill and humour by the superb Simon Ecob (of Viz comic fame). Alongside the poster is our set of tools and guidance that can help you make a start on understanding and measuring social value and wellbeing. We use the new HM Treasury recommended measure of economic value for wellbeing - the WELLBY. Alongside the poster is a technical report on how we arrive at the figures using some of the best data sets and analysis techniques available. And it's ON SALE NOW. £6 download or £20 for a glorious A2 poster for the wall of your office, bedroom or loo. https://lnkd.in/e_4ebfEE #wellbeing #economics #investment

Eat my goal....Our new model of social value for Sport England is out today. Could not be more relevant to the new 10 year plan for the NHS for prevention and community health care! It really has got the lot. A team effort: State of Life put together a consortium with a strong spine and structure - Sheffield Hallam University (big thanks to Girish Ramchandani, Shia Ping Kung); The Manchester Metropolitan University (Professor Larissa Davies). Along with check ins with our old friend Christian Krekel (the Cigarette Smoking Man) at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). And the Sport England directors of football Rob Flatt, Dominique Lammie and Andrew Spiers. New tactics. The major evolution for this model is to shift sport and physical activity towards the standards of evidence and measures that we see in health economics. And this is made possible by the new HM Treasury recommenced WELLBY measure we are such big fans of. No losers but some bigger winners. Another big shift is that we can now see how much more valuable activity is for different groups in society. No-one loses by being more active, it’s good for everyone. But there are some significant winners revealed in this new evidence. - It can be double the wellbeing impact to work with people who are inactive vs those already fairly active. Being physically active rather than inactive generates an annual wellbeing value of £2,500 per adult (while becoming 'fairly active' is £1,200 per adult, per year) - There is a much greater benefit to working with those who are inactive and disabled or with long term health conditions. Around £5,000 per year, per person - It is also more valuable to work with women, children and those will multiple factors of inequality. A marathon not a sprint. This is the start of a three year project and next we can start to look at settings (outdoor vs indoor), regional variation, team sport vs individual fitness. The finishing line. The sprint finish was to show the work to State of Life’s friend Gus O’Donnell. As ever he was spot on in saying: "Constraints on public spending are severe. This makes it more important than ever to focus our investments on those most in need and where we can make the most difference. This new evidence for Sport England starts to point the way" 1-0 up at half time but a long way to go. We'll continue to give 110% and just hope the fans can get behind us in the second half. All the work can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eQxeW4zq

Churches: our National Help Service. This new study builds on the House of Good work in 2020 with the brave team at National Churches Trust. It's a look at churches, of all faiths, from a different lens. That of health and social care. Foodbanks, Drug and Alcohol support and Mental Health groups are all hosted, run by churches in the heart of communities. And these buildings also provide the motivated, caring volunteers. This is frontline social care for people in crisis. This new work uses the WELLBY values as benchmarked to the NHS measure of economic value, the QALY. It shows that Churches provide social care that relieves the immense burden on the NHS by £8.4billion a year. https://lnkd.in/eBXiR_td We may not all believe in God but we can certainly believe in Good. Finally, thanks to authors Allan Little and Jasmine Kazantzis and Sara MacLennan for peer review. Also the team at Lark for the superb summary report; when we need a big idea brought to life in a smart, simple way. They never let us down!

Online harms and children's wellbeing. Well worth a read this one. A very thorough bit of work and big thanks to Nancy Hey, Sara MacLennan, Allan Little and Jasmine Kazantzis for setting it all up and doing such a fine job. And big thanks to the excellent team at Ofcom for a professional project! There is so much in here to learn and apply. https://lnkd.in/eH9Ffeu9

Wellby this and Wellby that. Here’s our one-page explainer of the WELLBY, and how it’s used to calculate the economic value of our wellbeing. https://lnkd.in/eUcysHTX

✊ We tend to do things a bit differently. And here we go again, smashing the system... Many of the social value tools and systems are behind paywalls or licenses. That doesn’t sit right with us. Most of what you need is and should freely available to help you make better decisions to improve the lives of others. A couple of years ago we produced 'Where’s WELLBY' - a poster to show what matters in terms of social value and avoiding misery. Now we’ve gone a bit further. Working with our pals at Impact Reporting and PRD, we’ve collaborated on Measure Up. https://lnkd.in/eNHTqk6W Measure Up is our collective attempt to flip the purpose and practise of social value. We need to move on from being pumped up on big numbers. We want social value numbers out there for free as estimates and guides on what your project MIGHT be worth. Our values are free because we all need to invest in evidence in order to better influence investment decisions and policy. This is about follow-through, accountability and transparency. And the social value sector is well overdue for this. Currently, there is a risk that a powerful concept is destroyed and devalued by big numbers that don't bear scrutiny. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. So let’s all Measure Up.

Following the work for Ofcom on children's wellbeing for the Online Safety Act and our important tinkering with the evolution of the C WELLBY (a way to report, measure the impact and value of children's wellbeing); we're now part of the below from Pro Bono Economics. It's all moving in the right direction... https://lnkd.in/eiWqH2as https://lnkd.in/eGseWT98 https://lnkd.in/eey_KTBp

It's one small step for man, one giant leap* for child wellbeing. Just another bit of work going where no-one has gone before...make it so State of Life. There is no established, accepted way to attribute the treasury WELLBY measure to children aged under ten. What this means is that the social value of policies and projects that impact children’s wellbeing are relatively unexplored.  We want to try and fix this  - to enable children’s wellbeing to become a priority in the analysis that decision makers rely on. So here's the launch of our 'starter for ten' discussion paper on how to use the WELLBY with kids. We have lift off... https://lnkd.in/epRjiVNE *maybe not giant, just significant.

Blair said education, education, education but when it comes to higher education this probably has to be vocation, vocation, vocation. https://lnkd.in/eit_Typr Last month was free PE in primary schools for Youth Sport Trust https://lnkd.in/ejKNWBFu Last week was child wellbeing online for ofcom https://lnkd.in/eiWqH2as Now we're all grown up and looking at the social and economic value of higher education for TASO the What Works Centre for higher education - working with our smart partner Mime. Started in 2021 this has been a complicated and fascinating bit of work - fair to say we learned a lot. More to come from this one we suspect

Coming soon for Ofcom on the very important Online Safety Act. Another interesting piece of work around children and young people's wellbeing - this time online. The new State of Life big brain Allan Little worked with equally clever Sara MacLennan. Full report will be published by Ofcom very soon. But a little blog on what we did and why it matters is here. https://lnkd.in/ePQcV4Fg