The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) is a community benefit society and cooperative working to develop healthy, happy communities living active and connected lives. They’re delivering ‘Active Communities’, one of 12 national pilots supported by Sport England through National Lottery funding. 

Working in partnership with Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC) and Birmingham City Council, the programme aims to bring communities across Birmingham and Solihull together through social and physical activity.

As part of this, they are running projects across the region encouraging people to become more socially connected and confident, with a greater opportunity and motivation to take part and benefit from physical activity. The programme uses the Happiness Pulse to measure the wellbeing of participants during their involvement. 

By doing so, they’ll have a deeper understanding than just tracking participation or levels of engagement. The metrics from the Happiness Pulse will help the programme understand how project participation impacts someone’s sense of belonging, self worth, engagement with the community and levels of social connection and support. 

The data collected is also a valuable resource for evidencing the need for and impact of the work that takes place – highlighting connections between individual wellbeing and wider societal change and helps make a clear link between activity, health and happiness. 

We’ve worked with TAWS and SMBC to develop a bespoke version of the Happiness Pulse which enables them to link survey responses with how people participate in activities, and track change over time. 

In conjunction with using the Happiness Pulse metrics to understand the impact projects have on individual’s wellbeing, the programme is also using the Thriving Places Index to assess project contribution to wider changes in the area in health, education, economy, community and place – with the local authority level data already gathered, tested and published annually via the TPI.