ACT Blog: What does Rural Wellbeing mean to you?
16th November 2022
That’s the question we asked ourselves, and tried to answer at our recent AGM.
We had Jeremy Leggett, the National Policy Advisor for Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) speaking, making the key point that while rural disadvantage does not attract as much attention as urban disadvantage, this is mostly because it is less visible and more dispersed, not necessarily less prevalent. Heating and travel costs are considerable issues for rural dwellers. You can see Jeremy’s presentation slides and a recording here:
Jeremy used three perspectives to explore rural wellbeing:
- Is wellbeing just the absence of ill-health?
- How does it link with our understanding of disadvantage?
- How do mental health and isolation affect wellbeing?
He also explained an approach to wellbeing based on the ‘Maslow hierarchy of needs’.
He concluded that there are no easy answers, but that the work of ACRE and local rural community charities such as ACT on: affordable housing, access to cash and access to healthy food were all increasingly important building blocks for wellbeing. ACRE has some interesting further comment here https://acre.org.uk/well-served-healthy-places/
At the AGM, ACT released its second Statement of Principles, this one on Rural Wellbeing. You will be able to see this on our Statements page very soon.
The statement covers what ACT believes, how we support communities and what we will champion. This statement has been adopted by the ACT Board and we are very keen to have your feedback on it as it will be regularly updated.
Thank you to Staveley and Finsthwaite who spoke about their work to build and maintain wellbeing in their community, with a focus on resilience and response to challenges such as loss of power and communication, storms, floods and water quality.
ACT thinks rural wellbeing is built on communities being able to:
- influence and manage local issues,
- develop shared goals, aspirations and plans,
- become sustainable and resilient.
This looks different in every community and we look forward to continuing to work with communities in these challenged times to support rural wellbeing.
All thoughts and feedback welcome to info@cumbriaaction.org.uk