Volunteering and wellbeing in culture & sport – this week’s pioneers

Give and connect are two of the five ways to wellbeing developed from the Foresight report into mental captial and wellbeing back in 2008.  These are two elements of volunteering.  Our interim Chair Lord Gus O’Donnell regularly points out the importance of broad measures of wellbeing and their superiority to activity measures like GDP as indicators of the success of governments and countries. One example he often gives is that UK GDP is now enhanced by increased illegal drug trade and prostitution, while the value of volunteering is not!

Our pioneers this week are all about volunteering in sport and cultural activities:

1. Join In – looks at wellbeing and sports volunteers following the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

2. If: Vounteering for wellbeing in the heritage sector established by the Imperial War Museum North and Manchester Museum

Our pioneers are short case studies of real projects, real places, real people and their evaluations.

→ be one of our pioneers

Evidence Programme: Culture & Sport

We will be looking in more detail at the evidence base around cultural and sporting activities and how they influence wellbeing.  Our evidence programme includes a theme specifically on culture and sport.  This is supported so far by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council England, Sport England, English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund.  Do get in touch if you want to partner with us to support our work in this area.

The deadline for applications for our evidence programme is 21 January 2015.

Have a great week,

Nancy