Upstream - Happy City Bristol with Liz Ziedler

Episode Date: September 1, 2016

Liz Zeidler is the Co-founder and Director of Happy City, an organization in Bristol, UK which is about giving people more of what we all want, but that our current economic system fails to give us: happiness. We interviewed her for part 3 of our 3-part series "Welcome to Frome" This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You're listening to an Upstream interview with Liz Ziedler, co-founder and director of Happy City Bristol. Welcome, Liz. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience? Okay, so I'm Liz Zeidler and I have been running Happy City for about six years. But prior to that, I did all sorts of really interesting things, mostly working around the world, supporting leadership and change at lots of different levels. So I used to do a lot of facilitation of big global events, trying to get people to have better conversations about the things that really matter. I helped run a leadership program that was designed in Africa by an amazing variety of African facilitators, and I supported them to try and take that to other parts of the world, which was quite exciting, the idea of taking an African model of leadership elsewhere. So I did

some of that right across Africa and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and the UK as well. Before that, I did a master's in international development while my children were quite small. So I'm also a mum. I have three adult children. Yeah, I've done all sorts of bits and pieces, mostly in social enterprise, sustainability and social justice kind of worlds over the years. But yeah, sort of 25 years of doing a lot of different things in a lot of different places. Just a quick note about what you mean by African leadership. So it was a really amazing program based on lots of global ideas like systems thinking and appreciative inquiry. But right at its heart was the notion of Ubuntu, which you may or may not have heard of. So the notion that I am because you are because we are, it was very much at the heart of it. So how do we lead in a way that supports that much more interdependent, collaborative notion of leadership

rather than the perhaps more hierarchical one we sometimes favor in the West? And here we are right now in Bristol and we are at the headquarters for Happy City Bristol. Would you tell us a little bit about this organization and how it was created? Yeah, so we set up Happy City about six and a half years ago now. It was set up by me and my husband and partner, Mike Zeidler. As I said, globally, I'd been doing a lot of work around sustainability and social justice and change. And Mike had been working much more locally and regionally around how do we get people to work better together.

So a lot of partnership working, a lot of cross-sectoral support. And I think what we had seen at a global level, there was lots of really, really interesting conversations being started around the sort of beyond GDP agenda that actually perhaps the reason we had so many of these huge crises at a an environmental and a social level were a lot to do with the economic system that we had and people were recognizing that we needed to start challenging that but then at a local level we also could see that there was huge amounts really exciting amounts of things going on to try and create a

new way of working and being and solving many of those problems at a local level. But there felt to us like quite a gulf between those two things. They didn't seem to be talking to each other very much. And a lot of the local activities seem to be focused on the symptoms. So we've got climate change challenges, we've got huge inequality challenges, and thousands of organisations are emerging to try and deal with the symptoms of those problems but actually locally remarkably little seem to be looking at what are some of the root causes and if the economic system that we've got is one of the root causes we need to be thinking about that at a local level not just at this meta global level so we wondered what would be different if we tried to translate some of that work that was going on

the UN and the OECD and some of the national governments were starting to think about it. What happened if we tried to translate that down into much more local initiatives? Because more and more people were talking about well-being as an important new way of thinking about our economy. But actually, when you talk to normal people, they don't think about their well-being in terms of, you know, international agreements or even national policy. My well-being is about me and my kids and my street and my community. And we felt that actually people could get quite excited about that idea if we took it much more down to a local level. So we slightly boldly stopped doing all the different things we were doing and taking the

income from that and set up Happy City to see could we help create a new way of working and being and and solving many of those problems at a local level by trying out different activities in a community to see what worked in helping people to see beyond this idea that economic growth and the growth of consumption was somehow a goal that we should be aspiring towards and make that shift towards the well-being of people and planet being the thing that we're aiming at and seeing things like the economy as just a means to that end rather than the end in itself. So you kind of went from think globally, act globally to think globally, act locally and kind of getting more and more down to the local level of power and action. Absolutely and

I think there was already so much going on and so much going on that is fantastic in this space. But it's not necessarily connecting to that really interesting thinking around actually what does this mean in terms of that much more substantial shift, societal shift that we need to be creating. So if we need to make a shift away from GDP as the king, if you like, the thing that we all measure our prosperity and success against, if we need to make that shift at a global level, we need to start doing that at a local level. But actually, for normal people on the streets, normal people in businesses and organisations and communities around the place, that feels like a very big leap. So we've always been trying to take some of the best thinking, academic thinking, that kind of global thinking, and make it really practical

for ordinary people who don't necessarily think that that's their role to try and shape society but actually are really passionate about shaping their lives. What's your working definition of happiness and well-being? It's a great question on one level we try and avoid giving a definition one of the reasons we're called happy city rather than well-being city or resilient city or any of the other sort of quite popular phrases in politics and the public sector at the moment is because if you go out and talk to people anywhere in the world and I have done a lot of this talking to people in all sorts of parts of the world what do you really want for your kids they'll tell you they want them to be

happy they won't say oh I really want my children to have lots of well-being they just don't use that language so we feel that if you want to make that shift, you need to use the language that people use, the stuff that people care about. And when you ask people what they want, they want happiness for themselves, their kids, their friends, their local community. So we use the word happiness, but we try to come at it from a question point of view. So rather than going into communities and saying, this is happiness, this is what you have to do to find happiness, we always come at it from the point of a question point of view. So rather than going into communities and saying, this is happiness, this is what you have to do to find happiness. We always come at it from the point of a question,

what do you know about well-being and happiness? What do you already from your own experience recognize as some of the roots that really bring lasting happiness that help support you to find that resilience that you're looking for? So we have a very, very broad definition. And one of the things I think is most exciting about this subject is its universality. Actually, if you ask people what are some of the key ingredients for happiness or lasting well-being, it doesn't really matter whether you're in rural Eritrea or Poland or Glasgow. The sorts of things that come up time and time and time again are things like a sense of belonging and community, a sense of purpose and feeling like you have some meaning in your life, being able to access green spaces,

feeling physically and emotionally able to bounce back when things go wrong. People understand what happiness and well-being means to them and what the real roots are. And they're incredibly binding because they bring us together regardless of our background and our culture and our age and I think that's a very exciting thing about it because I think it can we're in a world that needs bridges rather than divisions and I think the notion of well-being and happiness as a as a key goal really has the capacity to bring people together and I think there's a huge amount of wisdom out there in the world about it that we just need to tap into, which is why we tend to go out with the question rather than the answer. Because I believe personally that we have the answer within us. We just don't

stop and think about it or talk about it often enough. So some of the research that I've seen has different ways to describe happiness. One dichotomy that I've seen is this idea of happiness as kind of momentary pleasure, hedonistic happiness, you know, the new pair of jeans, the new car, that type of thing, a really good meal, or this kind of altruistic eudaimonic happiness, which is based on helping others or those kind of intrinsic values. I'm wondering when you ask people this question and people kind of respond with, well, you know, consumption does make me happy or having, you know, Acosta, you know, does make me happy or Levi's does make me happy. You know, how do you, knowing your background and your research and also how holistic working definition of happiness, including the environment and all that fits in,

how do you kind of engage with those conversations? I think it's really interesting that if you add the word lasting, it really changes the conversation. So, you know, what makes you happy in the moment may be, well be all sorts of very, you know, hedonistic things. And there is nothing wrong with pleasure. We're certainly not anti-pleasure. So a degree of supporting people to find pleasure in their lives is absolutely fine. And even stuff, we're not anti-stuff either. There are things that we need in our lives and some elements of the things that we need and the things that we want are important for our happiness. So we're not simplistic about it in that sense. But I think what we're trying to help people see is that if they stop and think

and act on the things that bring that lasting sense of well-being, that lasting resilience, if you like, then they're far more likely to be in a position where they can gain most even from the pleasurable aspects, you know, the more simplistic pleasures. So my experience, and it has been very, very varied, is that if you ask people what brings them lasting happiness, they immediately go to that much broader, deeper, more community-based idea of happiness. But we also do, in lots of our training, help people to see the small, simple ways

that they can get moments of pleasure because actually moments of pleasure are very important for us. You know, emotional, having positive emotions is an incredibly important element of our resilience. If we don't top up our reservoir of well-being by having positive experiences, then we can struggle when times get tough. So it is important that we balance that out and we aren't too sort of holier than thou about it, but it's about what even brings you those moments of pleasure. Do they all have to be

about consumption? Do they have to be at somebody else's cost? Can they be about stopping for a moment and savoring a piece of nature or really, really relishing time with friends instead of just, you know, taking it for granted? So quite a lot of it is about how can we squeeze out the most from all of the opportunities life gives us for both the pleasurable moments and the deeply meaningful moments. Let's try and just really, really bring into the public consciousness how important all of those things are to us individually and to us collectively. You mentioned that the work that you do is very influenced by a lot of research. And I'm hearing a lot of references to human-scale development and needs and satisfiers and that work

and also a little bit of gross national happiness in Bhutan. I'm wondering what are some of the things that have influenced the work that you do in Happy City Bristol? Well, it's a huge spectrum, if you like. When we first set up the organization, we already had very good networks in policy and academia and all those sorts of things. So we had the option to go straight in at know policy and academia and all those sorts of things so we had the option to go straight in at that kind of level and try and influence policy and influence the decision making processes in cities in that quite top-down way we made quite a conscious decision very early on that if we really wanted to support this kind of mind shift that I talked about earlier

in communities and in cities we needed really to start there we needed to start in communities so from the very very beginning we literally rolled up our sleeves and went out we had so many volunteers involved and we just went out into communities we ran events we ran all sorts of different projects using art and film and food and faith and all sorts of things to get people talking, to listen to the hopes and the fears and the excitement that ordinary people in ordinary communities, many of whom were in the traditional economic sense disadvantaged, but actually still have huge amounts of wisdom, of course, about this field. So I think in many ways, the greatest research and influence we've had is from those conversations.

Although, of prosperity, around positive psychology, around appreciative inquiry and systems thinking, and all of those sorts of theories that are out there, all of which have influenced our work deeply, but actually really starting to pin down exactly what we start measuring and the things that we start supporting in communities. I think the biggest influence has been those conversations that we've had in prisons and schools and doctor surgeries and community centres and street corners for the last four or five years.

Because as far as we're concerned, if it doesn't really matter to normal people and if normal people don't get it, then it's always going to stay in a policy space. It's going to stay on an academic shelf. And we want this to be something that really influences the hearts and minds and actions, most importantly, of every citizen of every city. So yes, academic work has been hugely influential on the work we've done.

But at the heart of it, if it doesn't chime with how normal people think, then we tend to shy away from it. So sometimes initiatives, for example, in Froome where I am, can only seem to reach a certain class or a certain group of people, even despite best efforts to really engage a wider group. And you were just mentioning how important it is to talk to as many people and really use language and engage with everyone as possible. What's your advice or the wisdom that you've learned about how to engage communities that might maybe roll their eyes at a happy city initiative,

like that maybe doesn't mean anything? How do you connect people with this idea in a way that really makes sense to them? Great question. So there's different levels of answer to that. So on one level, I always struggle a little bit. We've heard, of course, that criticism many times, not necessarily of our work, but of the principle of it. And often people have this assumption that happiness and well-being is only something that, you know, people are worried about if they're, you know, white, middle class, affluent.

You know, if you're doing all right, let's sort out the big stuff, the important things, and then let's worry about happiness. It feels a fluffy, nice-to-have addition at the end of it. I absolutely challenge that notion. Not only do I think the lack of happiness and well-being is a fundamental cause of climate change and crime and addiction and antisocial behavior and all sorts of other things, there's lots and lots of evidence that that's the case. So not only do i think it's fundamentally important to all of those issues but also i think it's fundamentally important to people's lives so if we think there's a universality about happiness we shouldn't assume that people in different economic circumstances or different cultural backgrounds aren't therefore interested in it so i think the way that we've got around it is

firstly being really really strong in our insistence that we use normal language. So we do always talk about happiness. We do ask really simple questions. Secondly, absolutely recognizing one of the reasons that if you look at our website or any of our materials, our sort of logo is a pointy hand. And that's because a lot of it is not saying we've got all the answers. It's pointing out, wow, look at that in your community. Look at that. Look at that, look at that. So we're asking people to think about what is around them.

What are the things that they know that in their own lives, in their own communities that are working, that help improve people's lives, bring happiness, bring wellbeing to the world. So I think that inquiring process rather than broadcasting process is probably the key for us so when we've gone into communities we haven't said hey where's some people from the outside and we've got all the answers to happiness come on gather around and we'll tell you we go in and we use different you

know social media campaigns or arts projects or gather people around with food or get multi-faith groups together for instance you know and asking people the question what does your faith tell you about the roots to lasting well-being and happiness and the importance of happiness and and then you get people talking right across those spaces and those otherwise seemingly insurmountable divides so i think the reason we've been pretty successful in that space is use simple language and ask don't tell that's probably the easiest way, and recognise that a banner like happiness is quite an open door to people. Our experience has not been actually in those communities that people think we won't be successful in,

that people aren't interested in it. If you put a big sign above the door saying green economics, then some people would go through the door, but many, many people wouldn't. Where you put a sign saying who's up for more happiness, then actually most people are like, well, that's quite interesting, I'll go and have a look at that. I'll go and chat to them about that. So it sort of opens up a door. And then you can start having conversations about some really quite big issues. But through this notion of all the things we're choosing really bringing us lasting happiness, and what's that doing to the next generation? And so we found

that you can have really huge conversations about economics and sustainability and all sorts of things you'd never be able to have in some communities. Well, you might be able to, but it'd be very, very hard through the lens of what does it mean to find happiness for yourself and have a happier city? What are the real roots to it? So I suppose that's a long answer to a simple question. You mentioned appreciative inquiry a few times. I wonder if you could explain what you mean by that. Yeah, I'm really passionate about appreciative inquiry, actually. We live in a world that is very good at learning from its mistakes.

I don't know anybody in the world who wasn't taught as a child, you must learn from your mistakes. And of course, you should learn from your mistakes. I don't deny for a moment that you should learn from your mistakes. But there's so much evidence to say that we learn much better and quicker and faster and more productively from what works. But rarely do we stop and really analyse what's working. I think it's fascinating that we spend millions of pounds on public inquiries in every country

around the world when something's gone wrong. So if something goes wrong, we have a public inquiry and we spend months or years working out what went wrong who should we blame you know how can we make sure it never ever happens again etc and in some cases that's very very important and i wholly approve but actually when something goes really well we don't spend millions of pounds going wow why did that work so well what were the keys to the success of that activity how can we do more of that how can we have more and more of it? So in many ways, appreciative inquiry is like doing that on a micro scale all the time. How can in every situation in life, the good things and the bad things, the times when things went well, the times when things went badly, how can we pause and think about what can I learn from this situation? What can I take?

What's constructive and positive and useful for me in my individual life or us as an organization or us as a community or a city or a country? We need to be more regularly pausing and thinking what's worked? What can I do more of? How can I spread what works much further? So appreciative inquiry in its simplest sense is that there's lots and lots of books and tomes written about how to actually do that but in a day-to-day way it's about always mining life for what you can constructively use from it and so happy city in some senses is like a huge appreciative inquiry in community about what works in terms of bringing lasting well-being and happiness what works in helping people and places to flourish in the long term. And a lot of our ways of doing things are about encouraging people to have those conversations for themselves and with each other locally. So you mentioned convening conversations in events and

neighborhoods. I'm wondering what are the other things that Happy City Bristol does in the community? So Happy City, we've always set out to create a kind of model of change for places. So we stopped right at the beginning and thought if we want to make this head shift, it's quite a big thing to talk about a sort of mind shift in a society and a whole group of like a city, but you know, a million people, half a million people. So a lot of what we've been doing is experimenting about what supports that kind of shift. But right from the word go, we've had sort of three key areas of activity that Happy City has been developing, modelling to support other places to pick it up as well. The first one is around communications and campaigns. So it's about those sorts of projects I talked about,

using all sorts of different mediums to get people thinking and talking and acting towards well-being. So I've mentioned some of them already. We've had all sorts of PR things, social media things, events, projects, you know, where we get people out in the community, taking photos and sharing them or having events where they're sitting and talking to each other about things or art projects in community centres, asking people about what works in their community or what helps bring them lasting happiness. So all sorts of different things to get people thinking and talking differently. In many ways in that space we've taken the best we think of the system that's made us such good consumers. The advertising industry is an incredibly powerful medium. It's brilliant. We may not love it, but it's brilliant

at doing its job, which is to get us to consume more this year than we did last year and more next year than we did this year, which is basically all GDP is. So it does a brilliant job of that. And we as campaigners and people who are passionate about a better future need to learn the lessons of why that works so powerfully, why it does make us want to buy more stuff, even when we don't need it, even when it doesn't really necessarily bring us happiness, we keep doing it as a society. So it works. So using some of those techniques, using design and branding well, using it for a better purpose, is very much the sort of heart of how we think and act in terms of that communications and campaign space. So that's the first of our three-legged stool.

The second one is around training. So we've developed quite a lot of different training programs and workshops to give people some of those skills, help people to develop the sorts of habits in their lives that can embed a well-being and happiness and resilience framework, if you like, in the way that they live their lives. and happiness and resilience framework, if you like, in the way that they live their lives. So we run all sorts of different workshops from an hour or two, little introduction things, to much longer courses that we've run,

again, in all sorts of different places. So we've run them with refugees and prisoners. We've also run them in banks and big public sector organisations because we think that your right and responsibility towards your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others is absolutely universal. So we don't mind where you work or what you do we think it's important that you understand and you can explore for yourself the real roots to well-being and again

as I've said before our training very much comes from that questioning space as well rather than saying here is the blueprint for happiness for everybody it's very much about what are some of the areas what's your wisdom how can we build this into your everyday lives so we do quite a lot of training at the moment we're developing um well-being champions network where we're developing well-being champions within those communities and organizations so we don't have to become some huge monolithic training organization we're developing drainers in community centers and businesses and health services and that sort of thing. So they can be delivering our training at scale all over the country. So that's quite exciting development in that space. And then the final one of the three-legged stool is measurement

and policy. So we knew very, very early on that we couldn't question the fundamental role of GDP in cities if we didn't offer an alternative and we looked of course around the world to say is there an alternative at city level for the very simplistic economic model and we couldn't find one that would really work at the three scales that we always work at we always try and support individuals to improve their own well-being and take take responsibility and and feel empowered to improve their own well-being we try and help communities and organisations to embed the notion of well-being into how they work so that it becomes part of the system of how things happen. And then we try and support policy makers and decision makers

to understand the influence of well-being on what they're doing and the influence of what they do on well-being. And we really couldn't find any tools at all that really supported that sort of shift in cities in terms of measurement tools or policy tools. So we've been working with lots of incredible people from all over the world who are experts in this field to develop a range of different tools that can support decision makers to make decisions based on the impact that they have on well-being rather than just on the impact on our consumption levels that they currently have. Let's chat a little bit about the Happy City Pulse. Who can commission the Pulse? What types of groups or organizations? So we've designed the Happiness Pulse, again, like I said before, to be relevant for individuals, for communities and organizations, and for cities.

Everything we do has to work at those three levels. for communities and organizations and for cities. Everything we do has to work at those three levels. So it's a really short survey around the different elements of well-being. We've grouped them into three domains that we developed, both in terms of the academic literature about different aspects of well-being, but also in terms of people's experience of it. So in all of those thousands of conversations we've had, what made sense to people in terms of those domains so the three domains are be do and connect so be loosely and it is slightly loosely

but it's loosely around mental and emotional well-being do is about our behavioral well-being one of the sorts of things that we do that help us improve our well-being and connect is about our relational well-being or social well-being. So those three domains measure a really good broad cross-section of well-being indicators at an individual level. When you take the survey yourself as an individual, you get your results back. You've got a real opportunity to dig down into those results and understand more about how you can improve those three domains, the ways that you can make quite small adjustments to your life to increase your own well-being. At an organizational level or community level, organizations can get a unique URL. So it's happinesspulse.org slash whatever their organization is. And then it can be used in two key ways. There

are other ways people are starting to experiment with it, but used in two key ways. One is around mapping well-being. So that might be the well-being of your staff, but it might be the wellbeing of your community or your stakeholders, or if you run a big housing association or your tenants maybe, or an educational establishment or your students. So mapping what are the strengths and weaknesses in terms of wellbeing, other particular demographics that need more support in different elements of their wellbeing. So being able to pinpoint much better what's needed in your community and where the strengths are so you can learn from them back to the appreciative inquiry idea the second way that they can use them is an evaluation tool so if they're doing different interventions they might be specific well-being

interventions but they may well be completely separate from it might be about a change to the transport system or it might be a all sorts of different interventions that will affect people's well-being so you can measure people's well-being beforehand and then measure after the intervention and see what sort of effect that that your activity has had on people's well-being because i think people often have an instinctive sense that their project or their activity is improving people's lives in a more general way but what they tend to measure are very very narrow specific things so if you run a amazing drugs project for young people your main measurement will be how many of the 20 kids get off drugs

which obviously is deeply important but maybe only half of them at the end of the program have absolutely gone clean but maybe the other half all now got a much stronger sense of belonging to their community or a much stronger sense of trust or value within their own lives and that's going to put them in such good stead for continuing along that path towards a cleaner relationship with drugs so it's those sorts of unseen consequences that we're trying to bring to the fore for organizations to start measuring the impact that they have whether it's positive or negative in some cases on the well being of the people they're working with so it's a it's a potentially a very powerful tool in that space and then obviously if you bring all of those together and you start having organizations right

across a city using the pulse or a town using the pulse then you start getting an exceptional map of what's happening in your communities what different demographics how they're feeling and functioning which sorts of groups have got the sorts of behaviors that are really going to be helping support their well-being or vice versa you can start understanding better where to place resources where to prioritize different interventions so it starts giving that kind of depth of understanding about your community that can really help create the conditions for people to thrive. And that's the bit that policymakers need to be thinking about. I'll be creating the conditions in which people can then take those steps for themselves to well-being. So organizationally, it's a very, very simple tool.

But we're excited about what happens when you get a lot of different organizations putting all of that together and the sort of difference that can make at a policy level. So you mentioned that you've been doing events and things in communities and there seem like in-person conversations so I'm wondering if you would recommend the Happy City Pulse but along with events or conversations in person as well to get kind of both of those things. So right from the word go, when we've been developing Happy City, we recognize that in many ways it's a systemic solution. We're not saying we will change society merely by training people about well-being. We won't change society merely by creating one new measure. We won't change society merely by getting this conversation going.

You need skills, you need different ways of thinking, you need different activities, and you need different measures and goals. So we very much think that the pieces of our jigsaw, if you like, fit together. And we've been testing them for this long to make sure that they do have that interactive space. And I think what we're finding over the sort of five years we've been doing things in Bristol is that they all do support each other and generate more interest from each other so if you're in an organization if you measure things through the using the pulse you'll then understand more about your staff for instance and you might want to provide some training to support

them to improve their well-being you might be doing something in a community and recognizing that there are real gaps in understanding and activity that support people's well-being. So you might want to run one of our events or communications and campaigns programs to try and get people thinking and talking and sharing their own wisdom and sharing their own experiences and using the sort of pointy hand to say, wow, did you know about this activity and this activity and this activity, which are nothing to do with Happy City. They're out there. There's thousands of them. I'm a real believer that every community is like a a rock it sits there and it looks like there's not very much going on but as soon as you lift the rock up there are thousands of ants and wood lice and you know there's a hive of activity underneath most communities are like

that and we don't necessarily see it from the outside so they do fit together really well you can do one without the other but it's always going to be more powerful if you can do both. So where we're working through this year is to be able to sort of parcel up in really, really easily adaptable and pick up a ball kits for people to say, here's the whole ream of happy city activities. Anyone, anywhere can pick them up and run and go with them in combination or not. So a place could say, right, we're going to do a whole Happy City project and we're going to do all the bits of it and we're going to set up a new arm of Happy City. Or it can be a totally separate group that says, actually, we just want to try this one thing out.

We're going to give that a go. And if that works, we might try something else and try something else. So we've tried to make it an incredibly adaptable system for people. A whole local authority can take it on on a big scale or one individual person in a community and say, I'm going to start from here and work my way up. So it's a pretty flexible model really. So what's your organizational goal? Is it to, in terms of structure, are you trying to make Happy City part of governments, local governments or national governments, or trying to make happy cities

in every town or city? Or is it that happy city will get bigger and bigger and support all the happy city initiatives all over the country? What's kind of the, or all of the above? Yeah, no, well, so we're aiming to be able to support other towns and cities to develop happy cities, but we don't want to become some huge organisation. So we're working towards creating a kind of, I think it's called a federated charity model where other places can set it up and they would be independent but supported by us. So we want to be able to still provide that kind of support. We've built up a really, really strong base of that balance between all that academic and expertise to make sure that the quality of the

products and the projects is really high but also a lot of know-how about how to just do this in normal communities as new places want to be doing some of this and we've got loads of interest from literally all over the world which is tiny bit terrifying at the moment but as new places start developing their own ideas how can we be feeding that back out to other cities etc because we don't think we've got all the answers you know so we don't want to become a huge organization ourselves, we want to have a really good strong core that supports, I mean, you've probably seen this in other organizations, like, you know, Incredible Edibles, or Transition does some of this, etc. You know, you can be a strong core, but allow each of the manifestations of it to have a huge

amount of independence. So that's very much where we want to be going. Within that, of course, each of our strands has got particular things that some places are more interested in. So local authorities and health bodies are really interested in our measurement policy work, because we've got the happiness pulse. We've also got the happy city index, which is a basket of indicators that demonstrate whether cities are creating the right conditions for well-being in their cities so much more of the sort of hard data around the city but a basket that really really focuses on well-being and a tool called a well-worth policy tool which translates well-being

into all of those more traditional spaces so what impact if you improve well-being by this amount according to this data what does all of the academic research say that will what impact will that have on crime or the economy or education or health etc so we can start helping policymakers to see the very very holistic systemic nature of well-being and the power of of investing in the well-being of people and planet and really really really treasuring those things and valuing them for what they are. So it's kind of a conversion tool for people to see the value that well-being is creating right across the societal system. So those tools are things that

local authorities and health bodies and a lot of other kind of big organizations are really interested in using to start making the case for this being deeply, deeply important. So any of those people can, you know, by the use of, by licenses of, any of those tools, without necessarily having to set up a whole happy city. But we do believe really strongly that it's rolling your sleeves up and getting it out there into communities that really starts embedding that shift that we're talking about. We spoke with the authors of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and they said that there's a connection between inequality and happiness. And they said greater equality brings greater happiness. I'm wondering if greater happiness

would bring greater equality. It's a really fantastic question. And one of the things that I get excited about in this area which can frustrate more kind of linear thinkers is that almost all of the loops around well-being are loops so equality improves well-being and well-being improves equality well-being improves physical health and physical health improves well-being same with education same with all of these things there's a dual impact there now you one can see that as confusing because statistically it then becomes difficult to know whether it's chicken or egg. But the other way to see it is it's a fantastic opportunity to create really amazing, positive, you know, the opposite of vicious circles. You know, there's huge amounts of evidence in both directions.

you know if we can really support people to understand better how to improve their well-being and resilience it supports people to be able to find and keep a job it supports people to be better at self-care so they look after their health better which also helps them to increase their capacity to stay and work all that sort of things so and the quality a lot of the well-being evidence shows that it's not just about employment or not employment about the quality of the work that you're doing having a sense of meaning and purpose in your work is really important that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be you know the head of the un you can be doing a very very simple job but understanding what meaning that brings to the rest of the world how can how can you see your job through the filter of what what worth it? And how can we be

valuing all of those jobs better, both financially valuing them and socially and emotionally valuing them more? So I think there's fantastically exciting two-way correlations between equality and well-being. And I think we need to do both. We need to work really hard politically at demonstrating the importance of equality for things like well-being and things like our Happy City Index that has equality as a very, very strong lens with which to see all of the well-being of people at the lower down the economic scale the impact that then has on all sorts of other financial implications and social implications starts telling people how important it is that we start doing that so i think both sides of that have a real role to the other let's make sure that people understand that equality is is deeply important for well-being but also let's start investing in the well-being of the communities that most need it because that will both improve inequality but also improve society on multiple different levels and i think

so i think there's a there's a beautiful marriage to be had there between those who are shouting and same for sustainability by the way massive believer that actually huge amounts of our overconsumption is because of this model that says it's all about growth and consumption if we can start focusing on the the goal being about well-being of people and planet and giving people the resources to fill that emotional void that many people have through much more sustainable much more real routes to happiness i think consumption levels and our carbon levels will reduce because of that so that these for me sustainability and inequality are the two kind of linchpins of of test really of whether well-being is is truly well-being you know rather than the sort of much more hedonic one you were talking about earlier

and both of them can create those fantastic loops that we need to to speed up this change because we can't sit around and wait for it you know we all know that there's some crises out there that are heading fast for us, which won't be good for any of our well-being. And another loop or another thing that I'm thinking of is personal change, you know, personal mindset change, and then systemic change. Because I've heard some people say to me when I've talked about happiness and beyond GDP, oh, well, this will just make people feel happier about the current economic system. And maybe people should feel angry and frustrated and should feel the suffering that comes with being in, you know, if you want to call it neoliberalism, capitalism.

And so, you know, how to ensure both that there's this individual mindset shift while this systemic shift is also happening. So I'm assuming that it's both working on those levels as well. It really is. And I think that's why we're so insistent that everything we do has to work on those different levels. There's the argument that says we need everyone to be angry. And I agree, I'm angry quite a lot of the time, as well as being pretty happy. I think we can find personal well-being within the difficulty, but that's not to say that we then ignore the difficulty. But I am a really, really strong believer that the big shift that we need to make is to move away from the economic

model we currently have. And we can't just do that politically. So yes, we can get angry with our politicians. We are trying to provide alternative to politicians. And actually, we are starting to make real inroads there. Lots of local authorities are really interested in the idea of embedding the sorts of tools we're talking about into their decision making so that is already really challenging the economic status quo because they're going to start asking their economic and business development departments and their education and their health and their crime departments all to justify what they're doing in terms of what effect that has on well-being well that's a massive shift so we are challenging

that status quo in a very big way. But that change also has to come from below. So it has to be that the voters are interested in other ideas around what's important to them. So getting more and more people talking in the pub and in the cafe and in the school playground about wellbeing being essential to them and to their communities

and what can we do that really supports our wellbeing, et cetera, et cetera, getting that conversation going, that's changing voters' ideas. It's changing consumers' ideas. It's shifting that pattern. We've got to remember that we are individually powerful as well as collectively powerful. So what Happy City tries to do is provide tools that help shift the collective power, if you like, try to really challenge what we're using and what we're measuring and what we're valuing but then support individuals not only to improve their own lives but start questioning what those routes are collectively to doing that and i think it's only when we do both of those

that we're going to make that change so we could be out there just getting all of those individuals to scream and shout but actually if we get those individuals to start changing their daily patterns, consuming less, connecting more, and much more of that, you know, eudaimonic well-being activity going on out there, the change starts happening of its own accord, as well as people demanding it of those above them. So, yeah, I'm a bit of a both-hand person generally. So if a town or a city wanted to adopt the happy city pulse could they customize the warning wording or add or take away questions and it says on the website it's a sliding scale and wondering how much that sliding scale is so the first question can they adapt it so the way that we have now designed it after all of this years and years of development is that we've got these three domains of the BDO connect, which is the sort of key well-being questions. Those may still change a tiny bit,

but by and large, they're going to stay the same. So the three sets of questions, because all of the evidence that we've done, it's been through also ridiculous levels of academic rigor to try and, you know, test every single question, the validity of the scale, etc, etc. I had no idea until i got into this space quite how complex creating a new measure is anyway that has been validated within an inch of its life so those that set of questions is fairly fixed the first three domain bits on top of that for the for the happy city pulse we've got a set of city questions that ask about how you interact with your city so do you use public transport do you engage with the arts activities etc to help guide city decision making now that set of questions is highly flexible we can change that we've already done an adaptation of it with

universities so that university there's a happy university pulse so universities can use the same well-being questions but then questions about how they are supported by their tutors or where they live in the university, et cetera, et cetera. So the university can start designing their support systems, et cetera, better to improve wellbeing. And that can then be used by universities all over the country. We've got quite a lot of interest in doing a housing pulse, doing a culture pulse, so looking at much more arts activities, et cetera.

So we can start digging down into the impact of different things for different sectors we can even go down to an organizational level obviously where people would have to pay for us to do that development work but asking the questions that are very specific to an organization or a town or whatever the benefit of that duality of flexibility with some fixed stuff is that you get all of that comparison so the fixed stuff people are taking taking all sorts of different demographics and places and spaces. So you can start seeing how people are doing in comparison to many, many, many thousands of others. So you've got the benefits of comparability with the benefits of flexibility is the aim. The sliding scale piece is what this pilot's about. So we've been doing this pilot with lots of different organizations to find out how useful

they're finding it, what they need more to make sure we've been doing this pilot with lots of different organisations to find out how useful they're finding it, what they need more to make sure we get it to exactly what they want. And then we're going to be working with all of those people who have been using it through this pilot to work out what that sliding scale is likely to be. Happy Cities' mission as a charity and a social enterprise is to get this out as far as we humanly can. So our aim is to make it as cheap as we possibly can

while still making sure it retains a quality that we'll need to keep checking that we're up against all the best evidence etc and improving as it goes along and obviously maintaining all the digital sites etc so we haven't got our sliding scale so i can't give you a nice simple answer to that but it will be to do with two different elements that will be different there so the size so if you're a you know a bank with a hundred thousand employees around the world we'll charge you a little bit more than if you're a local allotment association funnily enough so a lot of it will be about the size of the organization and their needs and the second thing will about how much how much you want us to do with the data so some people just literally want the raw data like here's the spreadsheet that's

your information that's all you want. Other people would like a nice, really simple level of reporting back on that, some nice simple infographics they can use for their community or whatever. And other people want a whole shed load of analysis with a big report about the well-being of their organization. Obviously, we have to charge according to what we have to do for the work. So the sliding scale will be in two ways. The size of the organisation and the demographic and the amount of work you want us to do on it. But we've done a lot of research about what's out there already

and we know we can offer it for infinitely less than most of the tools that are out there because most of them are there for commercial reasons. So we're very confident it's going to be very good value for organisations. The other interesting one, we're having conversations with the Cabinet Office nationally because they're quite interested in the idea that bigger organisations like big funding organisations

or big public sector organisations could buy a sort of multiple licence and then give it as a tool to lots of community organisations who work with them to use for free so that the cost is taken by the public sector body or the big funder and then they say here here you go use it as much as you like so there's there are different models that we're looking at to try and make sure it's as

affordable as humanly possible for the people we really want to support out in the communities and is this just for a uk audience or international? It's very definitely for an international audience. The challenge, and it is quite, the pulse is lesser, but the main challenge is linguistics. So the language, as you've already pointed out at the beginning, around well-being and happiness is quite subtle. And actually asking questions about, you know, do you feel what you do in life is worthwhile?

You've got to translate that perfectly for you to get data back that is remotely comparable otherwise if there's a little bit of a nuance about what people mean by that you'll get very very different responses from people so it's not quite as simple as shoving our tool through google translate you know we need to get that right but we have got interest from something ridiculous like 23 different countries at the moment so we are really keen and up for doing that piece of work. But obviously it's quite a chunky piece of work and we'd want to do it in partnership with absolutely the right people out there to make sure we did it well because we've spent so much time getting this bit right

that we don't want then to throw out all that rigor and quality for the sake of getting it out internationally as quickly as we can. One of the other things that Froome is looking at is Max Neff human scale development and looking at needs and instead of asking about the areas of the happy city pulse, instead asking about needs and are your needs being met? So I'm wondering how to balance that because it seems like they're yeah they're both so related yeah is it that happiness is when all our needs are met is that what it is or that the the needs questions are within the happy city pulse and all of that or should they be I don't know there's just an interesting conversation there between the two there is yeah so I think there's much less

difference than it possibly looks like from the outside there's a difference in language but um happy city pulse isn't the only we're not suggesting it's the only you know throw out every other measure you have we now have the happy city pulse you don't need anything else because we absolutely recognize you know Maslow's hierarchy and all that stuff there are things that we all need in society the reason that we don't have all of those in the happy city pulse is because we're pretty confident that most places are already measuring a lot of that stuff. They're not necessarily prioritizing it, but they're measuring quite a lot of it. So most cities and towns around the country know the employment levels, the levels of income differential. They know the basics of education and health and the rest of it.

Those things, as I mentioned, are in our Happy City Index work. But in the Happiness Pulse, we're saying you're getting all of that hard data. And what's that actually meaning for the other needs that we have as human beings? What does that mean in people's lives? What does it mean in terms of people's relationships? What does it mean in terms of their mental health? What does it mean in terms of those broader human needs, if you like? So I think there is still a really strong need, of course, for us understanding the hard data in society. But I think what we're trying to do is say the purpose of all of that is

to help people to thrive. Let's check whether they're thriving or not. On an anecdotal level, we all know people who have very little economically or physically that seem remarkably resilient and seem to really, really thrive in many, many ways. And we also know, I'm sure, again, anecdotally, people who seem to have everything they could possibly ever hope for and seem absolutely miserable and really, really struggling. And so it isn't as simple as saying, we just all need X, Y, and Z. We need to understand much more the connections between those and do the old appreciative inquiry thing and say, okay, so what can we learn from this community

where people are thriving in different elements? How can we understand what's working in that community and do it in other communities? A lot of what we're trying to do is not only highlight needs, but highlight successes, highlight what's working how is it that that particular community has got unbelievably high levels of trust whereas another community that demographically looks very similar are really really struggling with a complete lack of trust and it's having huge effect on so many other things in their in their community so how do we how do we learn but we can't learn unless we

can unless we have that evidence that this is what's happening we need to be able to measure things like trust and belonging and connection and i'm going to keep using those examples because they're such strong examples things we're not measuring at the moment we need to be measuring that so that we can spot those best practices and then share that around a bit so there's very little between max neve's work and ours intellectually. They're supposed to be a slightly different approach, but I think that they're pretty complementary. And we're looking at quite a few.

There's quite a lot of those different sort of measures around the place, and we're looking more and more at how we can support a more collaborative, joined-up way of working rather than us all being out there competing because we all want the same ultimate end. Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time absolute pleasure thank you you've been listening to an upstream interview with Liz Ziedler for more episodes and interviews please visit upstreampodcast.org The sun is rising in the hallways

Flowers blooming from the bulbs that bring To the morning we run Our hopes that break To the morning we run To shoreline Calling us to speak our song Waves under the earth and rocks Fasting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the

hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run to shoreline To the shoreline Calling us to speak faster Lights under the earth and pearls

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