Live Well Tasmania – Winners Healthy Tasmania Community Achievement Award 2022

“Why call ourselves Live Well Tasmania?”

For us, if everybody focused on achieving what is needed to live well, the world would better sustain human flourishing and would be a better place for everyone, as well as other species, and for all future life. Our basic idea of living well is where everyone satisfies their basic needs for good food, invigorating exercise, a range of both close relationships and also supporting but more distant relationships, contact and appreciation of all that nature that does for us, making and listening to music, and also very importantly, having meaningful work and/or a meaningful purpose in life. We believe everyone should have the opportunity to find their purpose, to develop and use their particular talent to contribute to a peaceful world.

Why limit it to Tasmania?

We do not consider Tasmania as superior to other places or think we should not concern ourselves with people living well in other places. However, we have a special responsibility to Tasmania since we live here and we can most effectively look after the place we live in. We focus on youth in poverty firstly because poverty means a lack of income to allow a dignified, productive, satisfying life. According to the research, there is a close, two-way relationship between poverty and mental ill health. Poverty exacerbates mental ill health, which in turn makes poverty worse.

Poverty is a social problem and its solution is social. We contend that community mobilisation is the way to end youth poverty. One challenge for youth is that as the publication ‘Scientific American Mind’ states, “Neuroscience reveals that the recklessness of the teen years is the product of a brain that has a newfound taste for exploration, but underdeveloped impulse control. Although this makes teens seem frighteningly rebellious, it also means that their brains are capable of great creativity and adaptability”.

“Research, evidence base”

Our work is based on ten years of research into community development and sustainability. It is based on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research including neuroscience, community psychology, anthropology, economics, socioeconomics and political science.

More specifically, we utilise the concept of sustainable wellbeing, where, as mentioned, everyone can satisfy their basic needs for good food, invigorating exercise, a range of both close relationships and also supporting more distant relationships, contact and appreciation of all that nature that does for us, making and listening to music, and also very importantly, having meaningful work and/or a meaningful purpose in life. We believe everyone should have the opportunity to find their purpose, to develop and use their particular talent to contribute.