#lifehack labs

It's the last week to get your applications in for #LifehackLabs!

Do something special this winter, and set yourself up to turn challenges into opportunities for the rest of your life.

Recently we launched LIFEHACK Labs - Aotearoa New Zealand's first social innovation lab. It's focus through the 5 week experience is to kickstart impact projects to improve youth wellbeing through technology.

Why Youth Wellbeing?

As many of you will know, LIFEHACK originated from the Prime Minister's Youth Mental Health project which shined a light on the challenges we face in our country with mental illness, stress, anxiety and other issues our young Kiwis face around our country. 

Our mandate at LIFEHACK was to explore how technology could act as a presentation or early intervention to help young people access services. The more we unpacked these mental health challenges and spoke with young people around the country through 2013 & 2014's events, the more we found people wanted to tackle the root causes, as well as helping people manage these challenges and alleviate the suffering.

In early 2014 we heeded that call and drive of our community, and tilted our focus towards Youth Wellbeing. We adopted the 5 Steps to Wellbeing which is widely recognised as leading research (from NEF in UK) to help people build personal resilience and wellness. Resilience is key to how we perceive and react to the world around us, it makes us more able to cope with unexpected changes, more adaptable to unknown futures.

We also recognised that our individual wellbeing is inextricably linked to other parts of the (global) society we live in - whether it's how our friends & whanau are getting on in life, a partner of ours, or big picture things like climate change, the local transport system, or decisions that are made for us in the Beehive which affect our future. Whilst resilience can get us so far in life, our wellness also depends on us interacting with this collective wellbeing, and feeling like we have the power to shape our own future - a sense of purpose.

It is clear we're here to work on complex social problems - wicked problems. To tackle these problems which are complex and interlinked, we need new approaches - we have technical and scientific labs to tackle the most pressing technical and scientific problems of our time, we need social labs to tackle our hardest social problems. To that end, we launched LIFEHACK Lab - and applications are open now.

Improving the wellbeing of young people is about working on all the big problems of our time, and unlocking the inherent creativity to be part of the solution in every single person in doing so. We have huge potential in Aotearoa New Zealand, but we're going to need each and every person if we're going to solve some of the problems ahead of us.

Why Technology?

The world is increasingly digital. Technology plays a role in almost every aspect of all of our lives in some form or another. Whether it's the mobile phone we use to call our friends, a website where we get information about upcoming events, the radio where we listen to music, a mobile app we use to learn a new language, or one of the newest devices which enable us to use our brain waves to control a digital interface... we have an opportunity to use technology for something more than productivity and efficiencies. Technology ventures around the world are showing us it's possible to fight cancer, treat depression, get fit, sleep better and more.

If we begin now, we can focus the future of technology on improving human wellbeing and driving positive behaviour change. This is the time of the internet of caring things.

Many young Kiwis have told us that they want the opportunity to take action to improve wellbeing for friends & whanau.

Over 75% of the people we spoke to said they would make space in their life if they were given the opportunity to do something truly impactful.

So we created LIFEHACK Labs.

As this is Aotearoa New Zealand's first ever social innovation lab, we put together this cheat sheet to give you a run down of what LIFEHACK Labs is all about.

Quite a few people have asked us how LIFEHACK Labs is different from Accelerator and Incubator programs, so we started with a quick side-by-side comparison. Accelerators & Incubators are important parts of the "support ecosystem", but LIFEHACK Labs - as you will see - is quite different.

Currently there is also a new breed of accelerators and incubators launching, such as LaunchPad from our friends at Ākina Foundation which seek to find and support a blended social & financial return. For the purposes of the below, we've compared to business accelerators & incubators.

We're excited to be able to provide this opportunity which may well produce teams with solid product/service ideas which would benefit from accelerator or incubator services once they have attended Labs.

If you have any questions, leave us a comment or get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!

Happy New Year folks!!

We're very excited to announce the first of our programs in 2014, to help catalyse grass roots action for youth wellbeing.

Back in December we put out the call for awesome Kiwis with ideas to get in touch for support. Through the last month, we've been re-designing Lifehack Labs with all our 2013 learnings, and we'll announce more about that soon.  In the meantime, we decided to create an online course to help people develop their ideas.

We chose 4 of the applicants to lead from the front, and we'll be serving them up a 3 week course which will take them from idea to action. We'll share some stories of their journeys & outcomes on this blog.

Here's to welcoming in 2014 with action. After all, in the wise words of Yoda...

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