What is Our life?
Our Life is a social enterprise established by NHS North West to give local people an opportunity to get involved in tackling health inequalities and to campaign for better wellbeing and health in the region. We are looking to you as an individual, and to your organisation to join the Our Life movement and participate so that together we can make a difference.
Why is Our Life needed?
It is not always easy for people to make healthy choices. Sometimes the healthy choices are more expensive or more difficult to access, but sometimes it’s just that they go against the grain of our culture and aren’t what people around us do.
Our Life wants to enlist the support of individuals and organisations across the region to understand why we behave as we do and what needs to change to create a healthy culture.
Our vision is for the North West to be the healthiest region in the UK.
How will Our Life operate?
Our mission is to campaign to tackle barriers to better wellbeing and health in the North West by raising issues and championing the views of citizens to people in positions of power in government, business and the media.
We believe that if we unite individuals and organisations to work together, we can create, challenge or change the significant policies and business practices that have influence over people’s behaviour, health and well-being.
Our Life is the mechanism to enable coordination, collaboration and impact to occur at the scale required to achieve this change.
By working together from different backgrounds and different perspectives, we will have the power to achieve long-term systemic change to improve health and well-being and transform our region.
We hope that you will become a part of it.
Current projects
The initial health focus for Our Life has been the over-consumption of food and alcohol, as this significantly affects our health across the North West.
Our Life’s first project – the Big Drink Debate survey – was created to understand better the relationship we have with alcohol in the North West and what people’s concerns are. More than 33,000 people from across the North West completed the survey between May and August 2008, making it the largest of its kind ever undertaken in the region. We are now campaigning to address the concerns that people raised, which included the very cheap availability of alcohol, and the fact people feel unsafe going into their town centres at night because of the drunken behaviour of others.
Contact Details
For more information, visit the Our Life website or contact us at:
Our Life, 4th Floor Dale House, 35 Dale Street, Manchester, M1 2HF.
Tel: 0161 233 7500.