Promoting wellbeing for social change makers

The Organisational Exploratory Program showcases our expertise in organisational change, intersubjective approaches to wellbeing and the social processes occurring within groups and organisations. 

In late 2018 TIHR was sought out by The Wellbeing Project (TWP) to become a partner in the Organisational Exploratory Program (OEP) and collaborate with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin to evaluate the project’s progress and impact. 

The OEP involved eight ‘social change’ organisations from across the world participating in a 2-year programme to make promoting and safeguarding staff wellbeing more central to their work cultures. 

These organisations, known as ‘change-makers’, all focused on caring or helping others in some capacity, and work to achieve positive social change and/or social justice. As social change organisations are often so focused on helping others, the importance of their own wellbeing and self-care are often marginalised, leading to higher rates of burnout, depression, divorce, for example. 

The OEP seeks to address this issue, not only for the benefit of the change-makers involved, but for the benefit of the people or causes change-makers endeavour to serve. With the support of TWP, The Centre for Healthy Minds, and TIHR, representatives from each participating organisation will implement projects within their organisations to promote wellbeing. 

Our role was to deliver a developmental evaluation of the project and lead on the qualitative components of the outcome evaluation. We worked closely with our international partners to provide a flexible, robust, and forward-thinking evaluation of the programme.

Participating organisations’ work ranged from rainforest conservation in Brazil, dynamic and culturally appropriate hip-hop based youth programs in Canada, and education and community development in Asia and Africa. Working with such a diverse range of organisations devoted to so many important causes has been an exciting prospect for the TIHR staff involved, and provided the opportunity to further the values we promote as individuals and an organisation.