Community-led wellbeing project gains momentum

Community stories: 19 December 2024

In the Bega Valley, strengthening capability for sharing resources was a community roadmap goal. The Bega Valley Data Collective (BVDC) had support through the Investing in Rural Community Futures (IRCF) program to develop a community-led wellbeing framework aimed at empowering the community to thrive.

The first stage of this was the Measuring What Matters in the Bega Valley project, which has now been successfully completed. As a community engagement initiative, the project provided crucial insights into the issues and priorities that matter most to Bega Valley residents.

Organisations who participated learnt how to access and use community data and how wellbeing frameworks can achieve meaningful impact for community-led decision making, as well as enhancing grant applications.

To mark the official launch of the Living Well in the Bega Valley campaign, BVDC hosted a film screening on November 18th in Merimbula. Titled Purpose, the documentary follows the journey of political economists Katherine Trebeck and Lorenzo Fioramonti as they seek to change the way progress is measured to change what governments do. Envisioning a world in which the economy serves the people, rather than the people serving it, the pair initiate political projects in the hope of shifting economic systems away from endless GDP growth, towards what really matters for people and planet.

The screening was followed by an enthusiastic Q&A session. April Merrick, FRRR’s NSW Programs Manager and committee member of BVDC, said the event provided a thought-provoking exploration of the wellbeing economy. “It was great to see so many engaged people turn out. It reinforced what we heard in our recent survey where over 90 percent of respondents rated community-led decision making as an important factor for community wellbeing.

BVDC has been developing partnership agreements with the University of Canberra and the Australian Bureau of Statistics and will be announcing two projects to come from these collaborations in early 2025.