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Lifehack’s Four Year Journey: Wrapping Up In October 2017

“Is Lifehack an institution or an intervention?” – Gina Rembe   As we draw to the close of Lifehack’s mahi, we would like to send a massive thank you and mihi to everybody who’s contributed to our kaupapa in the last four years. Our active programmes are ending and the team is moving on at…

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Impactful Co-design Training: An Impact Story from Palmerston North

Are impactful co-design training events possible? Does a short one-off co-design training event justify investment? Those questions wereat the back of Paul and Gina’s mind when they hosted the Palmy North Codesign Summit – a two day co-design training to support the local youth sector to take a collaborative, cross-sectoral approach to their work. The initial…

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Oro Hackathon -The journey, outcomes and reflections

Written by former Lifehack teamie Dayna Carter The Oro Hackathon was delivered over the weekend of 28-30 July, 2017 and was a success for all sorts of reasons. Firstly, each of the three powerful Upper Hutt based projects walked away with lots of outputs developed in collaboration with 60 + people involved into weekend, to…

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Guest post: Eleanor Hurton @ the Codesign for Youth Wellbeing Symposium

This is a guest post from Eleanor Hurton who attended the Co-design for Youth Wellbeing Symposium in September. It’s also a shout-out to the Shuttleworth Foundation, which supported the Symposium with a one-off, no-strings-attached grant. When we received an email earlier this year offering us a no-strings attached grant, we assumed it must be a…

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Programme Design for Impact: Features from the Flourishing Fellowship

Designing a programme for impact is an ever-evolving art. This post shares some of the key programme design features from our flagship programme, the Flourishing Fellowship. In 2017 we hosted our third iteration of the Flourishing Fellowship. Some aspects of the programme have remained constant, such as the venues, and having three hui spread over…

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A Sneak Peak at the 2017 Fellowship Impact Report

We’re busy compiling the 2017 Fellowship Impact Report. As silly as it might sound, we’re bursting at the seams to share some of the high level results and learnings. We’d like to give a big mihi to Angelique Praat from the Ripple Collective for their evaluation genius and evaluative leadership. Angelique has drafted the Impact Report,…

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How To Use User Personas (And Our Personas From The Fellowship)

User personas are a powerful tool to help clarify who you’re trying to serve and how you can best help them. As a tool from the start-up, marketing and design worlds, we wanted to show you how we’ve used them in our own work, and how you might use them in yours! But first, what…

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Guest blog post: George Gribbin @ the Collaborative Trust Hui 2017

  I had the privilege of attending the Collaborative Hui on the 27th and 28th of April on behalf of the Lifehack Community. It was a fantastic couple of days with hope, optimism and challenge embedded throughout. The Hui was set in the lovely grounds of St Andrews College and the weather was on point.…

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At the intersection of education, design and wellbeing: The OJC Wellbeing Collaboration

Over the past six months Lifehack has been working alongside progressive and newly established Ormiston Junior College, mental health advocacy organisation Changing Minds and Auckland Libraries to co-host action-oriented learning with young people aged eleven to fifteen (Years 7-10). This blog post shares the highlights of this youth-centred, cross-disciplinary, cross-sector project. Background In 2015 during…

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Enabling participation in co-design

It’s time to go full circle and share with you our learnings on youth participation over the past three years. If you’re working in youth development or you’re part of a start-up that’s building a cross-disciplinary wellbeing/mental health intervention, read on! There might be some useful gems in here to help support safe, ethical and…

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The Vulnerable Children Act & Your Practice

  If you work with young people, you will likely know about the Vulnerable Children Act 2014 and have a vague idea about the practicalities of this legislation. We teamed up with Kaitaia Constable and 2017 Flourishing Fellow, Rowena Jones, putting some questions to her about the VCA. Thanks also goes out to Kelsey Brown…

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What I learnt from my time with Lifehack

I have dreamt and thought about Lifehack for the last three and a half years. Since joining the team in early 2014, I have done just about all of the roles and tasks under the sun, from organising events to writing reports, listening to communities, designing programmes, facilitating workshops, evaluating initiatives and more.   I’ve…

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Embedding evidence in social-change work: Using protective factors

Over the years we’ve been trying to work out how to best embed evidence in our mahi in a way that’s accessible, practical and engaging. Much of the best-practice and research of how to improve wellbeing has been done and written up by smart folks from a variety of places. They give us an indication…

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Oro Hackathon returns to Upper Hutt

Guest post by Paul Thompson of Upper Hutt Community Youth Trust   Why would I want to be involved in a hackathon and give up a whole weekend to help?  I mean I’m busy, I have too many things on and too many people that I’m working with already. Sound familiar?  Last year a group…

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Online Project Kitchens

Experimenting with online facilitation Over the past six months, Lifehack has been experimenting with online environment as a way to get ideas off the ground and awhi the work of various members of our community. In February, Olivia & Kieran hosted a online ako about supporting LGBTIQ to flourish and then in March Christina hosted…

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