Make Seattle Happy Report: A Blueprint for Raising

Awareness in Your Community about the importance of happiness as a guide for the future of our nation, neighborhoods

and personal life

PART ONE: RAISING AWARENESS

Part One: Raising Awareness

Our goal: to increase awareness of the importance of happiness as a guide for public policy and

social change

Guiding us for this work:

UN Resolution 65/309 “Towards a Holistic Approach to Sustainable Development” adopted August 23 2011.

An invitation to replace Gross Domestic Product with Happiness on a national level.

The Make Seattle Happy ProjectConducted by Make It Happy and

The Happiness Initiative

Step One: Ask People “What Makes Your City a Happy Place?”

find a public place with lots of traffic wear a sandwich board with the question on it

offer people a post it and sharpie pencollect the post-its on your boardtake lots of picturesshoot lots of video

This step is part of Make It Happy’s Happy Post project.

We took over 100 photos

check them out at www.flickr.com/photos/thehappinessinitiativeand click on the set “raising awareness”

We produced videos.

view the videos at www.happycounts.org/raiseawareness

Step Two: The Data we created a word cloud, which shows graphically which words were used most frequently other ways include lists, clusters, posters NOTE: It is important to communicate that the data collected is not from a scientific sample, and for raising awareness only!

What Makes Seattle Happy? A Word Cloud from 500 people’s responses

community

culture

education & learning

environment governance

material well-being

health

psychological well-being

social connection

time balance

Word Clouds in the Domains of Gross National Happiness

Step Three: Communication we held a panel discussion where we shot videos of the panelists and participantswe created a poster of all the post-its as a backdrop for our panel discussion there are many other ways to communicate – social media, world-café style events, TEDx style talks, etc.

Videos of panelists and participants:

view the videos at www.happycounts.org/raiseawarenessreport

What about negative media? Sometimes happiness work elicits negative media. If this happens: Fly high – Rather than respond directly, issue a press release stating the purpose of your project, linking it to the importance of happiness for government, and the current status of society and the environment with a system guided primarily by consumption, money and economic growth. Camps you can’t win in: Fly higher. As much as they may try to incite, keep to your purpose.

What next?

Part Two: Measuring HappinessPart Three: Policy Recommendations

Visit happycounts.org to gather tools and resources for grassroots activism in your community

towards a new economic paradigmyour happiness counts. count your happiness

Make Seattle Happy: A Blueprint for Raising Awareness in Your Community.

Please use these materials to raise awareness about the importance of happiness and well-being, the happiness movement and the aim of a new economic paradigm. These materials may be used or reproduced for any non-commercial use. For more information, inquiries or comments, please email info@happycounts.org or visit happycounts.org Report compiled by: Laura Musikanski, JD, MBAEditing team: Eldan Goldenberg, James BradburyCopyright © The Happiness Initiative 2013