Scotland News

WEAll Scotland Team Update: What Are We Working On?

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Published on September 16, 2021

It’s been a busy few months for the team here at WEAll Scotland.

From organising online events and putting the finishing touches on reports to kickstarting some exciting new partnerships—the list goes on. We asked some of our core team members to share with you what they’ve been working on lately.

If you want to learn more about any of these updates, please get in touch! We’re always looking to listen and learn about new ideas, opportunities, and examples of the wellbeing economy in action.

Jimmy Paul, WEAll Scotland Director

I’m delighted to share a snippet of what we’ve been up to here at WEAll Scotland!

Our project with the Cairngorms National Park is now underway. We are taking a Wellbeing Economy Stocktake, co-creating cornerstone indicators and taking forward work around the Wellbeing Economy and business. All with a view of delivering social justice on a healthy planet; starting in the Cairngorms. 

Another project is to build a children’s wellbeing budget in a local authority area. After interest from local authorities all across Scotland, we agreed to partner with Perth and Kinross! Our delivery team, the brilliant Kelly and Sarah, are now in place and starting their work. This project will co-create locality based, wellbeing services focused on prevention, early intervention and which build personal and community resilience. This is such an important an exciting project which, like the Cairngorms project, is all about shifting the power base and working with communities to deliver a Wellbeing Economy. 

As well as the above, WEAll Scotland now holds the secretariat for a cross party group on a Wellbeing Economy. Being a non-political organisation, the principles that underpin a Wellbeing Economy appeal across the political spectrum and we have the involvement of MSPs which reflects this. We have our first meeting on the 22nd September.

We’re continuing to grow our fantastic network of Allies, sitting now at 32! Watch this space; in autumn we will put together a programme of events and sessions for Allies to connect with each other more than ever before, accelerating our individual and collective impact.

Anna Chrysopoulou, Core Team Member

I’ve been on working on the launch of two reports:

Failure Demand: Counting the true costs of an unjust and unsustainable economic system

The report examines two case studies of Scotland and Alberta, Canada to demonstrate the fiscal impact of the current economic model: how much is currently deployed in response (albeit inadequately) of the way the economy harms people, communities, and the environment. The research focuses on three key interlinked sectors (paid work, the housing sector, and the environment) to illustrate that governments are caught in a cycle of paying to fix the damage that the prevailing economic system continues to create, known as ‘failure demand’. Although it is acknowledged that governments will always need to be reactive to immediate needs, the report is concerned with demands that could be avoided in a Wellbeing Economy scenario.

Tapping into a Wellbeing Economy: Lessons from Scotland’s craft breweries about the importance of local production

This research project aims to demonstrate the role of local production as a key pillar in a just transition from the current economic model to a socially fairer economy which concurrently respects planetary boundaries. To achieve this, the project uses the craft brewing sector as a lens to identify the factors that could encourage local production, the sector’s contribution to regional economic development, and the practices that could be shared with other industries. Through this process, the project seeks to deepen our understanding and advance the conversation in Scotland around transitioning to a Wellbeing Economy, one that delivers social justice on a healthy planet.

Denisha Killoh, WEAll Scotland Trustee

Although I’m currently in the middle of a transition from a WEAll Scotland core team member to a trustee, my priorities have not faltered from the need to make the communities most impacted and marginalised by the current system the architects of designing and delivering a Wellbeing Economy. I advocated for this at the ‘Women in the Wellbeing Economy’ event hosted by the WEAll Global team, and I currently represent Scotland alongside Jimmy Paul on the UK-wide Future Generations Commission, to promote this view in line with the principles of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill.

Joey Gartin, Core Team Member

Looking after comms on the WEAll Scotland core team, I’m lucky that I get to stick my nose into so many different projects. After a few months of organising some exciting events (including a webinar on business and the wellbeing economy and our recent Q&A with our director, Jimmy), I’ve spent the last few weeks writing: from newsletters and blog posts to engaging with our followers on social media. But I’m most looking forward to supporting The Poverty Alliance during Challenge Poverty Week, which takes place 4th-10th October. The campaign highlights that poverty is a problem that we can solve, and there are solutions that we can all get behind. One of the key themes this year is “redesigning our economy to reflect our shared values of justice and compassion” . . . in other words: a wellbeing economy.

Katherine Trebeck, WEAll Scotland Co-Founder

Apart from the usual suite of agenda promotion work (talks, articles, media pieces), I’ve been deep in working on two exciting upcoming projects—figuring out the details, team, and activities. One is with the Cairngorms National Park: we’ll be part of a consortium, and I’m scoping our role to bring the Wellbeing Economy thinking into valuing the work that happens in the Park, embracing the role of business, and understanding what more needs to be done. The second project is yet to be 100% confirmed so I can’t say the name, but it is with a fantastic organisation who want to work with us on their theory of change to ensure their activities and the support they provide others is aligned to the Wellbeing Economy agenda.

Linda White, Core Team Member

WEAll Scotland is an organisation which thrives on the time, skills and passion of its volunteers. The Hub’s resources are therefore highly prized. As our activities grow in response to an increasing number of time-bound projects and long-term collaborations, it’s imperative that we utilise our core team to its maximum potential. Currently I am working to identify and deploy the best option for smart resource planning to ensure appropriate scheduling, project performance, finance management, forecasting potential capacity gaps, timely decisions, and team engagement. This will complement other tools in our project management landscape delivered by me and others. I also have fingers in other pies, including contributions to the emerging strategy and organisational structure as well as impact evaluation.

Lukas Hardt, Core Team Member

I am Lukas, a core team volunteer for WEAll Scotland, and I am currently working on revising the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section for the WEAll website. The section provides brief answers to more than 50 of the questions WEAll commonly gets asked. For example, ‘What is a wellbeing economy?’ or ‘How can we make a wellbeing economy happen?’ The answers to these questions are not only useful for visitors to our website, they are also an important resource for our spokespeople, who promote the ideas of a wellbeing economy to lots of different audiences. Working on these answers also makes us at WEAll really think through the more challenging aspects of a wellbeing economy and the stories we want to tell around it.

Sarah Deas, WEAll Scotland Trustee

It’s an exciting time for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance around the world. In 2018, WEAll Scotland was the first WEAll place-based Hub to be established. The network has grown significantly over the last few years with 19 hubs now in development in countries, states, regions and cities across the world. These include Australia, Brazil, Canada,  Costa Rica, Cymru (Wales), Denmark, East Africa, Iberia, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, North Carolina, Trinidad and Vermont. I represent the Hubs on WEAll’s Global Council and helps facilitate bimonthly meetings designed to strengthen the network.

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