Rising to the Challenge: Towards enhancing the wellbeing of an urban community in New Zealand

Abstract

This thesis is about improving the mental health, wellbeing and quality of life of the people of an urban, diverse and disadvantaged community in Auckland, New Zealand. It was an attempt to facilitate greater connectedness and solidarity within that community so that they would be empowered to act together to achieve common goals. The theoretical aspect of this study was motivated by the aspirational philosophy, principles and values articulated in the population mental health promotion (PMHP) paradigm. PMHP advocates trusting the innate resourcefulness of people to create supportive environments where individual and collective resilience may be realised. The practice aspect of this study involved using a people-centred planning and evaluating procedural framework, the PEOPLE System, to establish and begin to evaluate a community-controlled community development project with the aim of enhancing the mental health and wellbeing of the whole community. This was done initially with a number of small Asian groups and later was extended to encompass the whole community. A central part of this second stage was a random household survey, to enable the people to identify their collective goals and priorities and to initiate actions to attain them. The results indicate that the PMHP theoretical paradigm is a very workable one and that the PEOPLE System provides an effective practical guide within this paradigm. This particular combination of theory and practice is proposed as constituting a new approach, named the PMHP Model. This thesis makes a unique contribution to existing knowledge by showing that the PMHP Model can be applied to a whole urban community and appears to be a highly promising approach to the enhancement of the mental health and wellbeing of that population. Because of the scale of the project, and the limited time frame of this study, it was not possible to apply the whole of the PEOPLE System; so any conclusions are tentative; however, the indications are that it is an approach that can meet the overall PMHP aims and can potentially be applied in many other communities in New Zealand and perhaps the world.