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.
Our Latest Articles
Visit the full lifehack blog page to see all our articles.
Lifehack 2017 Programmes and Funding Update
It’s time for the next Lifehack update for 2017 and we have lots to share. We also have an update on the future of Lifehack. What’s been going on: We’ve got two cracking programmes running at the moment. We’re working with teachers, students and community collaborators at an Auckland school exploring wellbeing in their school and…
How to run a codesign workshop in your town
Late last month, Gina and Paul travelled up to Palmerston North to facilitate the Palmy North Youth Codesign Summit. It was a two day event to practise codesign with other youth practitioners in Palmy North. In this post, they reflect on how you might be able to run a similar workshop in your own town.…
Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant
Some emails just seem too good to be true. Often, they involve suggestions of no-strings-attached offers of monetary support. One such email landed in our inbox just a couple of weeks ago. We sent it around the team and I had a look online to work out whether it was legitimate. After some research it…
How to create an environment for LGBTIQ youth to flourish
Helping LGBTIQ youth to flourish Earlier this year, a few awesome humans came together to discuss a pretty important topic – ‘How do we create an environment for LGBTIQ youth wellbeing?’ LGBTIQ stands for: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer. This korero was co-hosted by Olivia and Kieran, two members of the 2016 Flourishing…
Working with Thicket to evaluate the impact of 2016’s Flourishing Fellowship
We are excited to share our newly released report into the 2016 Lifehack Flourishing Fellowship evaluation by Thicket. This is a co-written blog post by Lifehack & Thicket, providing some background and context to the report, and our learnings from working together. Lifehack on meeting Thicket Thicket Labs specialise in ways to quantitatively…
Enabling Youth Wellbeing: Developing a Lifehack Impact Model
Over several months at the end of 2016 we developed a comprehensive impact model for Lifehack. It helps consolidate and share what we’ve learnt between 2013 and 2016 about how an innovation initiative like Lifehack creates and tracks impact. The Impact Model makes explicit the outcomes and kinds of impact we seek to create and…
How can you live and work bi-culturally in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Lifehack Flourishing Fellow, hustler and Glen Innes #GITilliDie mana wahine Christina Leef recently hosted a kōrero around living and working biculturally. A kōrero interspersed with lyrical junctures, the uncovering of assumptions and some brave patai (questions) that sparked some important thinking for everybody who attended. It was one of our Online Ako (skill-sharing) Sessions –…
What we’ve learnt from running the Fellowship
Lifehack’s programme designs have been iterations from all the work we’ve done in the past. Not only do we spent time reflecting and implementing learnings into future programmes, we also take inspiration from practitioners around the globe. If you’re curious how we designed Oro, our place-based programme from late last year, check out this post.…
Funding your participation in the Flourishing Fellowship
This post outlines how we’re supporting applicants to make the Fellowship financially accessible. We would love your feedback on this support, so please do email us at hello@lifehackhq.co if you have any thoughts. Applications for the 2017 Flourishing Fellowship closed last week! And while we’ve extended the deadline to allow some extra people to apply,…
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!
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.
