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.
Six months on – Youthline and Sovereign
Earlier this year we set off on a project with Sovereign Insurance and Youthline Manukau. The idea was to augment the existing community partnership between the two organisations, while synchronously improving the wellbeing of young people through support services offered to them. For Youthline, it was about utilising the Sovereign team’s demonstrable business acumen for…
Gina Rembe: Designing place-based programmes (Throwback to November 2016)
Late last year Gina wrote a Medium article about her reflections on designing place-based programmes. Over time, both anecdotes and data tell us that our programmes have become more meaningful — whether it’s people realising the size of their own potential and acting on it for more meaningful personal life, or starting evidence-backed ventures that contribute to…
Tahatū Rangi: An area ripe for disruption
Hosted by Platform Trust, Tahatū Rangi bought together around one hundred people from the NGO mental health and addictions workforce at Te Papa on the 20 & 21st October. Toni and Dayna from Lifehack went along to check it out. The key theme of this symposium was collaboration, how we might go about working better…
Oro–Upper Hutt Programme has begun
Our new programme, Oro, kicked off two weekends ago. And what a weekend it was! We were joined by twenty five people, all whom had deep personal or professional connections to Upper Hutt. We couldn’t have done this without support from the Namaste Foundation, CAYAD, ACC, Upper Hutt City Council and the Upper Hutt Community…
Designing Oro–Upper Hutt
Below are some five lessons from working at the intersection—and how we integrated those in our newest programme Oro. Lifehack has been experimenting with different programme shapes and intensities since early in 2014. This has resulted in us running online courses, part-time and full-time programmes. It’s been two-day weekend events or programmes so long people…
Lifehack’s top three reasons for getting back to nature #mhawnz
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week at the moment. The focus this year is connecting with nature and in this post we’ll be telling you our top three reasons to get out in nature and the benefits to your wellbeing. You might have noticed the #mhawnz across social media—and we’d love to hear from you…
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week #mhwnz
Mental Health Awareness Week is marked by 150 countries annually, and this week is Aotearoa’s turn! During this week you’ll see a bunch of social media posts with the #mhawnz and we encourage you to get involved. You can check out what’s happening in your local area here. Connecting with nature can be a super…
Lifehack at Festival For The Future
Photo by Iris Riddle. Iris is the marketing manager at Inspiring Stories and was also on the 2016 Flourishing Fellowship Last weekend, the Lifehack team had the amazing opportunity to attend Festival For The Future. Over 900 people gather at the Aotea Centre in Central Auckland to listen to keynote speakers, attend workshops and…
Reflections on Te Tiriti o Waitangi workshop
Reflections on Te Tiriti o Waitangi workshop The following is a post by Christina Curley, a 2015 Flourishing Fellow on her reflections of attending Te Tiriti o Waitangi workshop. What does it mean to be a bicultural and purpose driven organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand? I’ve been thinking recently about this as I’m working through the process of creating organisational cultures for my startups (Upwards and Savvy Up), as growing a baby company from scratch means the chance to “bake in” cultural practices/tikanga. So it was with this frame of reference…
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.
