Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

World events such as COVID and climate change have highlighted the interconnectedness of people and planet for living well in community. Despite our interconnectedness, wellbeing in community practice is positioned largely as a subjective psycho-social health issue that is best addressed through, individualised agentic strengths-based and resilience approaches. At the other end of the spectrum, wellbeing is understood as a set of discreet measurable social determinants or living standards. Neither fully captures the complex interplay between individual and structural influences on lived wellbeing in the community. Community practice researchers need holistic methodologies that can critically evaluate wellbeing for people and planet, whilst not obscuring the lived experience of wellbeing to inform effective policy and practice responses. This paper discusses the development of international evolution of cultural wellbeing into Living Standards frameworks and proposes an alternative Cultural Wellbeing Framework (CWF) that focuses on mapping lived wellbeing in community contexts. The CWF has emerged from community-centred research over ten years and aims to reframe wellbeing as a process of lived ecology that acknowledges the local and global influences on wellbeing using the language that reflects the lived experience of communities.