1 Vision

Inclusive and supportive communities

The Learning for Well-being approach is designed to contribute to our vision of how we would like our world to be:

Inclusive and supportive societies where everyone realises their unique potential throughout their life

Implicit in this vision is the belief that it is only through developing inclusive and supportive societies that everyone will be able to realize their unique potential. Therefore, learning for well-being must focus on supporting environments and processes that allow individuals and groups to develop as competent systems.  Changes to societies are only possible through individuals and groups engaging in holistic and systemic processes for themselves and others.

We believe this can occur through developing their capacities to make decisions and take actions that serve themselves, others, and their communities, but the question of measuring well-being remains: how can one track the impact of developing capacities or holistic and systemic processes?  How does one assess the presence of greater wholeness in the system?

Reminding ourselves to use nature as a guide, we note that living systems offer feedback through the overall health and functioning of the system — not to examine the parts in isolation but to experience its dynamic wellness.  In that spirit, we offer a set of statements as our response to “how do you measure well-being”? In that sense, they can be considered qualitative indicators of well-being. In the spirit of play, they begin with the letter “a” as a reminder that this is “a list”, not necessarily “the” list, and we call them “aspirations” to emphasize that they are idealistic — in keeping with the best we can offer to ourselves and others as humans.