Why Total Wellbeing? Walk Together’s vision is now to achieve Total Wellbeing for all people. We arrived at the vision via our lived experiences and observations of the profound negative impact of colonisation on First Nation peoples in New Zealand, Australia, and many other parts. In developing Walk Together over the past decade, two things have emerged:
- our ever-heightening awareness of the inequities and inequalities on every continent in a vast range of sites in, for example, in cultural, social, economic, and religious areas
- constant feedback from clients of the value and virtues of our vision and WT as a process to achieve it.
How we work in the space of Wellbeing: We have found that the most appropriate and beneficial process to achieve wellbeing is to focus on constructing effective personal and social relationships before engaging in transactional (business) activities. The relational process as still practiced in traditional non-Western societies and functionally performed in Western societies offers a relatively common starting point to bring different cultures to a point of connected interaction. Once the connected interaction is observable, gradually begin to introduce transactional activities and processes.
What is possible when Wellbeing is the Vision: We agree with many sentiments expressed in the poem below, especially
- no one is or can be an island, we are all part of the main
- any human death we could have prevented diminishes us.
To Walk Together means an emphasis on relationships and connectivity to work and strive together in a Between World. The outcome will be mutually beneficial outcomes for all participants with no enforced change in culture unless they choose it.