Carnegie UK Strategy to 2030

Our strategic aim

The strategic aim that currently shapes and guides our work is to put wellbeing at the heart of government decision-making. This means growing support for a wellbeing approach to public policy, led by evidence and insight on what works to improve wellbeing and why. We support governments and policymakers at all levels in the UK and Ireland, helping them to think differently about how we understand society, assess and contribute to social progress, and tackle issues that threaten aspects of wellbeing.

Our roles

Our endowment and our independence allow us to think carefully and long-term, making deliberate choices about the roles we play as an organisation to make progress towards realising our strategic aim. Most of our work comes under the following three categories of activity:

Insight & ideas: Generating the research, evidence, practice insight and policy recommendations to help people live well together today and into the future.

Convening and advocacy: Bringing together “unusual friends” to contribute to coalitions for change. Using our platform to promote voices that we hear from less often.

Wellbeing visions: Developing and sharing compelling visions and ideas of what living well together looks like in practice. Focussed on the long-term changes we need.

Our commitment to learning

We know that Carnegie UK’s contribution to the realisation of collective wellbeing is only one within a wider ecosystem of those working for social change. How this change happens is itself continuously evolving. We are therefore committed to investing time and resource into continuous learning and iterating our approaches as we go.

As a team we take pride in being curious and passionate about collective wellbeing, continuously seeking out the latest insight and evidence on this wide-ranging policy area and learning how it can be augmented. We are committed to embedding consideration of these questions in our practice:

• What are we learning about collective wellbeing?
• What are we learning about how change comes about?

Because we have a unique remit that extends to the whole of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, we draw our evidence base from a broad field and share the learnings widely and openly, nationally and internationally.

Our values

At Carnegie UK our values actively inform our work and inform how we interact with colleagues, collaborators and partners:

• Motivated by change: We are galvanised by wellbeing approaches that change people’s lives for the better; we commit to assessing and understanding our impact.
• Collaborative: We are invested in the collective impact of alliances; we commit to building coalitions to tackle wellbeing injustices and change systems.
• Kind: We believe in radical kindness as the connection we have to each other and to wider society; we commit to putting strong relationships at the heart of everything we do.
• Challenging: We recognise that social progress requires asking hard questions of ourselves and others; we commit to using research and evidence to speak truth to power.