Action for Happiness: our highlights of 2011
22 Dec 2011 | Action for Happiness
Wow, what a year 2011 has been. So many happy memories!
This is just the beginning of the journey towards a happier
society - and we still need huge changes right across our
society - but there has been a lot of encouraging progress during
the year. Here are some of the highlights...
January: we ran a fantastic 5-day Happiness
Challenge series with BBC Breakfast and also had a great
reaction to our Sunday Sermon at the School of Life.
February: we finalised and started sharing our
new
Ten Keys to Happier Living framework and developed a series of
posters
to accompany each of the keys.
March: we completed development of our new
website www.actionforhappiness.org (and our Director
Mark's third child - Harry - was born too!).
April: our official launch of Action for
Happiness with a very memorable Launch Event and huge media
coverage (which led our website to temporarily crash from high
volumes!).
May: reached our first major milestone of
10,000 members, saw local groups starting to spring up
around the country and took our call for action out to various festivals.
June: lots of our members took part in A Good Week,
doing good things for others around them at home, at work and in
their local communities.
July: good progress politically, with a new UN resolution calling for greater focus on
happiness and the UK government laying out plans to use wellbeing data to inform policy
making.
August: great response to our proposals for a
new Happiness in Schools initiative;
we also gave the happiness & wellbeing perspective
on the riots which rocked the UK.
September: 450 people turned out for our
inaugural evening seminar with the wonderful Matthieu Ricard;
we also hit a big social media milestone with 10,000 followers on
Facebook.
October: we screened the wonderful film
'Happy' and our members started arranging local screenings; our
co-founder Richard Layard became chair of the new WEF council on wellbeing.
November: held a Happiness at
Work event to launch Henry Stewart's great new book and
encouraged more members and organisations to join our Happier
Workplaces initiative.
December: the EU president wrote to all
world leaders calling for happiness to be a priority in 2012
and giving his support to Action for Happiness; we also screened
the film I
AM.
Our year in numbers
- 20 million people estimated to have heard or read about our
movement (in the UK alone)
- 350,000 unique visitors to our website
- 21,000 social media followers
- 18,500 members signed up to the cause
- 7,000 people we've spoken with at events
- 1,600 people attended events we put on
- 120 countries represented by our members
Thanks
Huge thanks to everyone who has joined and supported Action for
Happiness this year and especially to all our volunteers, interns
and advisors for their amazing enthusiasm, hard work and
generosity! Without you none of this would have been
possible.
Tags:
Be part of something bigger, Be a Happiness Activist