Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been considered the ultimate metric for national prosperity — countries are ranked by the amount of money and goods that flow through them. But the Himalayan country of Bhutan has received tons of attention for its Happiness Index, which measures the psychological well being of its citizens.
Now Santa Monica, California is following in Bhutan’s cheerful footsteps. City officials first began wanting to measure happiness when two public tragedies — a gang shooting of a local resident and the suicide of a ninth grader at a local high school — shook the tranquil beachfront city.
“Grappling with these kinds of issues sort of brought people together to look at new ways of doing things,” city employee and Wellbeing Project director Julie Rusk told Co.Exist.
In 2012, the city released a Youth Wellbeing Report Card, and in March 2013, the city won funding from the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge for attempting to develop a single metric that mayors all over the country could use to measure happiness.
In a video produced for the Mayors Challenge, Santa Monica residents of all ages and races are shown sitting on a public bus. Words related to their well-being (belonging, health, peace of mind, safety, fitness) float over their heads in large white letters. Keeping all these factors in mind, city officials are now working with everyone from psychologists to public health researchers to determine how to quantify and measure public happiness.
Though it’s not yet clear exactly what form the happiness index will take, Santa Monica’s Well-Being team is considering using analytics from Twitter and Facebook, sensor data from roadways, and even voluntary data feeds from residents’ cellphones.
Santa Monica’s goal is to create a happiness index by the end of 2014 that other cities around the country could replicate.
As Pharrell says, clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.
Tag: Santa Monica
This Waiter Serves Meals on a Silver Platter to the Homeless
Across this country, millions of people do not have money for food or a home.
While both hunger and homelessness are problems that won’t soon go away, a group of homeless people had their bellies and their hearts filled for a day, thanks to 21-year-old YouTube star DJ Sennett.
Sennett, the creator of popular YouTube channel Public Prank, didn’t just hand out cold cut sandwiches. He went the extra mile of dressing up as a waiter and presenting hearty meals like chicken with green beans on a silver platter. The most touching moment? After DJ presents a chicken dinner to a man down on his luck, the man responds, “I used to eat like this. This will get me through the day.”
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The vlogger — better known for sillier fare such as drinking Windex and scaring the bejesus out of a friend Paranormal Activity-style — has quite the following (more than 500,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel) and receives hundreds of thousands if not millions of views for each of his uploads. And now, as Sennett told Good Morning America, he’s turned over a new leaf and plans to use his clout for good.
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“When I started the channel in high school it was just kind of messing around doing stupid stuff, but it’s turned into something now where I realize I have an audience and I have a voice with it,” Sennett told GMA. “This one has led me to realize I can do something more with it than just be silly on camera.”
“It’s inspired me to come up with creative things that are not only funny to people but that have a message behind them,” he added.
By the looks of his most recent work, it appears he’s off to an amazing start.
When Immigration Reform Got Stuck in Washington, This Entrepreneur Stepped Up
Tech entrepreneur Joe Green was Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate and Facebook’s sixth user, but he doesn’t share the political disinterest of some of his Silicon Valley colleagues. Having attended the mostly minority Santa Monica High School where he had a lot of undocumented friends, Green ran for the Santa Monica School Board at age 17. He won on a platform promising a living wage for service industry workers, many of whom were immigrants. In college, he studied community organizing with Marshall Ganz, who’d once worked with Cesar Chavez, and discovered parallels between community organizing and social networking. “Community organizing is all about friendships. And the Internet is all about relationships,” Green recently told Elizabeth Lorente of Fox Latino. “I ended up being someone who cares a lot about politics who also worked in tech.”
A co-founder of the company Causes, which uses social media to spur funding for nonprofits, and NationBuilder, which encourages political organizing, Green is now pressing for immigration reform through his political advocacy group FWD.us. He even got his old buddy Zuckerberg to help fund it. The group generates political support for immigration reform, on both sides of the aisle, and also works with immigrants directly. Recently FWD.us sponsored a hackathon for 20 young undocumented programmers, and afterward continued to work with the contest participants.
As Green told Fox Latino, he sees immigration as quintessentially American: “There’s a lot of stuff that America is not the best at, but when you travel around the world you see that America is pro-immigrant. … We are better than almost anybody else at welcoming people from around the world.”