Building wellbeing into regional decision-making

Understanding wellbeing is important

Providing a good quality of life to residents is essential for any community – but particularly for rural communities. Multiple studies show that whether a rural community thrives or declines over time depends on whether it provides a high quality of life for its residents. This high quality of life is driven by many things – only one of which is economic opportunity. Just as important as having a healthy economy is having a healthy local environment, good parks and recreation facilities, quality housing, well-kept buildings, a friendly and welcoming community, a safe community, and access to essential services and infrastructure, to name a few.

Rural communities lack easy access to the information they need

Investing in the wellbeing of rural communities is central to their future success. To be able to invest in wellbeing, rural leaders need quality, timely and local information on wellbeing that is relevant to their community. Rural communities need data for their community – not data showing what the ‘average’ rural community looks like.

Information on its own is not enough – communities need to be able to use it to support decision making

Communities not only need the ability to monitor how their wellbeing is changing over time: they also need leadership support to build capacity to act on this type of information. Building wellbeing into regional decision-making will embed consideration of wellbeing in community discussions.

Project aims

This project aims to support a group of regional leaders to understand what changing wellbeing means for their community, and how to build a wellbeing focus into decision making processes in order to support and grow wellbeing in their community. The project will develop and test a suite of resources designed to:

• Create wellbeing frameworks tailored to small communities;
• Enable rural communities to better understand and monitor wellbeing; and
• Build the capacity of community leaders to use and integrate this understanding of wellbeing into discussion and decision-making processes in their communities.

Project outputs

The project will produce the following resources to support communities around Australia:

• Regional Wellbeing Monitoring Hub: An online resource to help people identify how to monitor wellbeing in their communities, making it easy to understand and use a wide range of indicators of wellbeing, and linking to available data sources.
• Three local community wellbeing frameworks: The project team will work with three communities to help them build their own bespoke wellbeing framework and report on the indicators in that framework; the lessons learned through this process will be used to improve design of the Regional Wellbeing Monitoring Hub, Wellbeing Framework Toolkit, and Wellbeing Leadership Program.
• Wellbeing Framework Toolkit: A toolkit that communities can use to build their own wellbeing framework, using indicators relevant to their community, with the Hub providing a range of resources they draw on as part of developing their individual Regional Wellbeing Frameworks.
• Wellbeing Leadership Program: Development and implementation of a rural leadership program that enables rural leaders across Australia to build capacity to identify and act on wellbeing challenges and opportunities in their community.

Project partners

The project is led by the University of Canberra’s WellRes Unit, and conducted in partnership with the University of Southern Queensland. It is funded by the Gardiner Foundation , a philanthropic organisation in Victoria which invests funds to maximise the benefits to all sectors of the Victorian dairy industry and Victorian dairy communities.

The project emerged from discussions with the Australian Rural Leadership Program graduates from Cohort 26, who have been advocating for more wellbeing-focused approaches for regional Australia. .

Project updates

Case study communities

Three case study communities have been selected following completion of the Expression of Interest process:

• Greater Shepparton in central Victoria
• Gannawarra Shire in northwestern Victoria
• In Wellington Shire (Gippsland), we are working on a wellbeing framework for the Stratford community and the ‘3862’ postcode Stratford is located in. The case study will also incorporate the Wellington Shire more broadly.

The project team is very excited to be working with these communities, and held productive inception meetings in late February and early March 2025.

The media release announcing the successful communities can be found HERE.

Implementing Wellbeing Leadership Program

Are you interested in working on the wellbeing of your regional community? Applications are now open for people in the three case study communities for a free program to help you build your skills to lead the implementation of a wellbeing approach in your community.

The Implementing Wellbeing Leadership Program (IWLP) features:

• A 10-20 person applied learning program experience over nine months
• A 2-day intensive workshop mid-way through the program
• A series of online classes and activities
• Designing and starting a small group community wellbeing initiative
• A concluding community presentation event.

Applications are open until 30 June. For further details click here and to express your interest in being part of the Program please click here. The project information sheet is available here.

Community of Practice

Are you interested in building your skills and networks in regional wellbeing?

The project is setting up a Community of Practice to enable people from around Australia to build their skills and networks. The Community of Practice will run as a virtual network, with a series of monthly online gatherings alternating between sharing experiences, project-related content and more general presentations from experts on different aspects of developing and using wellbeing frameworks.

If you’d like to join the group please email kim.houghton@canberra.edu