Why equality matters

We've just added The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkiinson and Kate Pickett to our bookshop at Life², and I can't believe it's taken us so long to get round to doing so.

I remember being impressed by this book when it first came out in hardback, and since then it has become well-known and exhaustively referenced by people and organisations seeking a range of types of social change. Its success is hardly surprising, as it has provided progressives with an important resource - namely, hard evidence as to how almost everything - from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy - is affected not only by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is. Its stark conclusion is that societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-off.

If you haven't checked it out yet, buy it now - and have a look at The Equality Trust - an organisation set up by the authors of the book to campaign on the same topic.

Making mental health accessible

The Mental Health Foundation do some good work in breaking down the big (and, for many people, scary) topic of mental health and showing how it relates to some more specific topics that can feature in many of our daily lives and experiences of life - including loneliness, happiness and fear. Their most recent report asks whether modern life is leading to greater loneliness.

This is important work, as it encourages people to see mental health not as a taboo subject, but as something we all need to look at and work on in life - just like our physical health. One of the most fundamental ways we can improve our experience of life is by improving the way we deal with this experience and how we see the world. Improving people's mental health is therefore an important component of Life²'s work - part of helping them to live happier, wiser and more meaningful lives.

Here are some links to a few of the MHF's recent campaigns and reports - Fear, Be Mindful and 10 ways to look after your mental health.

More genius from The Onion

I couldn't resist this from The Onion - 'Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once'

The lost art of living well

I have written a brief article to provide more details on the rationale for our not-for-profit organisation Life².

Its basic argument is that we face a range of challenges and pressures as individuals living in the modern world, and if we are to flourish in this environment we each need to be given access to a particular range of life skills and information in our lives. Currently, these are not being adequately provided by institutions in modern society, so Life² has been set up to begin providing them to the general public, and to raise awareness of the need for them in society.

Click here to read the article. Click here for an outline of the organisation and some of its activities to date.

Change for the better

There seems to be change in the air: not the vacuous, meaningless version of it pedalled by David Cameron and other election hopefuls, but a sense that we need to address some more subtle issues relating to how people see and deal with the world if we are to secure a better future.

We have been speaking to a couple of these initiatives recently with the possibility in mind of collaboration in the future - one is the Movement for Happiness set up by Professor Lord Richard Layard, Geoff Mulgan and Anthony Seldon, which is due to launch in September this year. Another is Citizen Ethics, set up by Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon. Check them out - each has its strong merits and areas of crossover with Life², but each is different from Life²'s work of equipping people with the tools, ideas and information to live more self-determined, wise, happy and meaningful lives.

I see Life² sitting in the middle of all this work, pulling together linked issues such as ethics, happiness and well-being - and I hope this puts us in a good place to move various strands of this agenda forward in the coming months and years.

Why should we use an agency?

A short while ago, I was asked by a fundraiser at a small-to-medium sized charity to draft them some notes about the benefits of using a fundraising agency, in order to help them convince their board to test it out.

When working with small-to-medium sized charities, we've often had to go through this process of 'building the case for using an agency' to non-fundraisers in the organisation before we can work with them (and are happy to do so, as it's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask). I therefore thought it would be useful to post the notes on here - so whether you are a fundraiser looking to convince your board or a non-fundraiser seeking to understand the benefits of using an agency - I hope these notes are useful. Check them, and other papers, out at the 'papers' section of the ChangeStar site here, or via this direct link.

The science of happiness

Most of us seek it in our lives, yet it has proved to be something that politicians are unable or unwilling to put at the centre of policy making – until now. In recent years, the science of happiness has been a growing area, and we are now able to identify and measure (with scientific backing) a number of the factors that are proven to make us happy and, conversely, unhappy.

Although policy makers are just starting to get to grips with the implications of this work for policy making, this report by the Young Foundation gives a useful overview of the impact that this thinking on happiness and well-being could have on policy developments in different areas of life – from the elderly to the workplace.

Anyone working for social or environmental change will be interested to read about the possible ways a focus on happiness and well-being could increase their effectiveness in seeking behaviour change from the public. Contact me if you want to discuss ways of applying this thinking to your organisation’s work.