Learning from Good Life Camden

In early 2025, Carnegie UK started a new project called the wellbeing frameworks community of practice. The goal was simple: bring together people from governments and councils across the UK and Ireland who are working systematically to improve people’s lives by taking a wellbeing approach to public policy.

One of the members of this community is Gemma Brayson, Good Life Camden Lead. In this article she offers reflections about her work and the work of her organisation.

Who are you?

I am the Good Life Lead at Camden Council. My role is to bring together the voices of people across Camden and turn their ideas about what a good life looks like into a shared vision that helps align efforts and measure impact. I work with council teams and partner organisations to set priorities, shape decisions, and measure the impact of programmes that support people to live well.

Tell me about Good Life Camden:

Good Life Camden is our wellbeing measurement framework, co-produced with residents. It helps us focus on what people have told us matters most for living a good life, and to answer a key question: Is life getting better for people in Camden?

The framework is built around nine themes: health, equality, and safety (our core themes), that sit at the heart of everything alongside environment, income and affordability, housing, education and lifelong learning, social connections, and empowered citizenship.

For each theme, we identified the changes we want to see—called “signals”—and how we track progress—called “measures.” For example, under safety, a key signal is that people feel safe, which we measure through residents’ perceptions of safety.

To support its use, we’ve developed practical tools, including a question bank and guidance, available on our webpage. The data collected through the framework is reported annually in our State of the Borough Report.

We’ve worked with a wide range of services and organisations, helping them articulate and refine what they are working towards and how they might measure impact, including: waste services, sustainable transport, carers, culture and parks.

We’ve heard public engagement is central to Good Life Camden, could you tell us about the importance of resident engagement for your approach?

Resident engagement was central to the design of Good Life Camden. In 2022, we ran a series of community events, including a What Matters Fair and a Data Expedition, involving more than 200 residents.

We also worked closely with a diverse group of around 20 residents through a series of workshops. Together, we explored ideas, challenged assumptions, and identified what matters most. While we started with a long list of potential “signals” for each theme, we prioritised those that residents felt were most relevant—recognising that too many priorities can make it harder to focus and take action.

A key part of the process was understanding how themes overlap. For example, under the environment theme, one signal is that people use clean modes of transport. Residents highlighted how this links to equality—particularly ensuring that people with mobility needs are not negatively impacted by these changes.

We combined insights from these workshops, wider community engagement, and existing best practice to shape the framework. It wasn’t straightforward—there were no single “right” answers—but the collaborative approach helped us build something that resonated.

Because of the diversity of residents involved, the framework reflects a wide range of experiences, including people with disabilities and neurodivergence, carers, older residents, those with English as a second language, and people from different cultural and economic backgrounds.

Now that the framework is in use across the borough, we’re continuing to engage residents to ensure it still reflects what matters most and to identify any changes needed.

Do you have any advice for your past self? Any key lessons learned along the way?

Put practical tools in place before launching a framework. They don’t need to be perfect—you can refine them over time—but they must clearly demonstrate value. Without that, it’s hard to maintain buy-in from teams or partners.

A common question is why use another framework when others already exist. The answer: the Good Life Camden framework isn’t meant to measure everything. It was co-produced with residents to reflect what they need for a good life. Use the parts that are relevant to your work and fill any gaps by drawing on other frameworks.