What Works: Centre for Wellbeing

Established in 2014, What Works is a UK government-funded initiative to enable a range of stakeholders to access independent, high quality, accessible evidence syntheses across a broad range of social policy areas, from crime reduction to health, social care and, now, to wellbeing.

In 2011, the Office for National Statistics began measuring wellbeing across the UK, and there is a growing movement to consider wellbeing as a key outcome of policy and service delivery. The question now is how to use the data and other evidence on wellbeing to create better policies and practices. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing aims to answer this question, bringing together robust evidence of what works and undertaking a knowledge mobilisation function to communicate the evidence to where it can use it to best effect.

Specifically, CLES is part of a consortium focusing on Community Wellbeing. Over the last three years, the consortium brought together evidence on the community-level factors that determine wellbeing. The aim is to identify steps that government, central and local, and community organisations can take to improve wellbeing.

The consortium will be organising events and engaging with stakeholders in order to frame the scope of the research. A guide has been developed by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, New Economics Foundation and the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, which brings together the most important things that organisations working with communities and individuals should  understand in order to measure subjective wellbeing. A series of explainer videos have also been produced to support it. Here CLES’ Jenny Rouse explain more about devising questions…

Keep in touch with Wellbeing What Works on Twitter: @WhatWorksWB

Check out the What Works Wellbeing blog for updates: www.whatworkswellbeing.org