Lifehack was a systems-level intervention in youth mental health and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand. Over 2013-2017 we grew the capacity of the system to support the wellbeing of young people, with an emphasis on co-design, prevention and capability building.

Use our runsheets, methods and other resources to improve your work alongside young people.

If you need inspiration or ideas for your own youth wellbeing programmes, our blog is the place for you.

Interested in our approach? Our initiatives page shows the range of programmes we ran from 2013 to 2017.

Our Impact

Lifehack put young people at the centre of service innovation. Between 2013 and 2017, we evolved our ways of working in response to evaluation and reflection on a wide range of activities.

We moved from an ‘app’ focus to working with people across the system who supported youth mental health and wellbeing. Working with people from diverse backgrounds and points of influence in the service system modeled our desire to move the system toward helping young people to flourish.

Our Final Report weaves the threads together

If you're strapped for time, head straight to the section for you:

  • Want to support youth-led lab, start up, social enterprise and innovation approaches to youth wellbeing? Section 4 is for you.
  • Working on the front-lines to influence youth wellbeing or responsible for workforce development? Check out Section 5.
  • Making policy about youth wellbeing, suicide prevention, education and youth development? You'll enjoy Section 6.
Lifehack final report title page

Our Latest Articles

Visit the full lifehack blog page to see all our articles.

Christchurch: Save The Date – 1 & 2 March!

Start Your Engines, we’re returning to Christchurch! We’re very excited to announce we’ll be announcing our full year’s event calendar soon, but in the meantime here’s a quick note to let those of you in the Garden City know we’ll be coming your way first! Lifehack Weekend Events have got an exciting new format this…

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Halfway In : Lifehack Labs Online

Wow, time is flying by for our first Lifehack Labs Online cohort! We set them a challenge at the beginning of the year; go from “I have an idea”, to “I have a version of my tech that I can trial with people”… in 3 weeks. So far, our Lifehackers have got some great ideas…

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How Tramping With Your Friends & Family This Holiday Is Better Than Giving Presents

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE LIFEHACK TEAM! This holiday season, we suggest you can do something better than spending the final days before Christmas running around the shops and getting stressed – Stop Now. Instead of giving a traditional present this year, give your family and friends a real treat – a trip to the forest!…

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The 5 Ways To Wellbeing

This is one of the most important pieces of research in the last decade – a guide to how we can improve our own wellbeing. This research shows that if we integrate Giving, Learning, Activities, Mindfulness and Connection into our lives, we can improve our mental health. This work from the NEF is one of the…

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Why is UX Design important? Well the work you’ll be doing to understand your users is paramount to every aspect of your business. We mentioned in our recent post about User Personas 101 that understanding the people you’re designing for is about the most important thing you can do. SO, have you delved deep enough…

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The Lifehack Labs Series #2: Problem Solving with User Personas

This is the second in the series of our LIFEHACK Labs posts to share how we approach different aspects of launching social ventures. There’s a great deal of research and understanding going into the best approaches to problem solving and entrepreneurship around the world. One of the few things that’s almost universally agreed upon, is that knowing…

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workisnotajob: If you were wondering… 

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Lifehack Labs : Call for Applications

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In Lifehack's four years, we've learned a lot about how to apply tools and processes from codesign, facilitation, technology, te ao Māori, social enterprise and wellbeing science to a youth wellbeing context.

We've released our supply of resources for you to use in your mahi alongside young people. So please - check them out, print them off and find out for yourself whether they can recharge your work with young people!

Community Hackathon Manual

Host Your Own Community Hackathon

Community Hackathons are a magical way to bring together a diverse community to work on promising projects. We've found them so useful that we created a step-by-step guide to promoting, organising and hosting your own community hackathon!

Wellbeing Design Challenge

A wellbeing design challenge based around milk – it sounds strange, right! But this is one of our favourite sessions that we’ve run time and time again. If you want to introduce people to design thinking, this is a great place to start.

Relationship Building Sort Cards

Relationship-building is one of the foundations of effective facilitation. If you're not sure how to get people beyond the superficial “what do you do for work?" question, this Relationship Building Sort Card package could be what you need.

Creating Group Kawa (Culture): Ko Wai Au Worksheet

Think back to the last time you joined a new group of people. Perhaps you started a new job, turned up to a meetup group, or attended a training workshop. Did you have the opportunity to contribute to the culture and norms (the kawa) of the group from the outset...?

We recommend getting support as early as possible if you, or someone you know, are having a hard time with wellbeing or mental distress. Mental distress affects one in five New Zealanders each year and around half of us will experience distress at some time in our lives.