Recover: Edmonton's Urban Wellness Plan

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Recover is an urban wellness project in Treaty 6 Territory (Edmonton, Alberta) that creates opportunities for connection, to help people and places thrive.

Addressing the need for connectedness is just as critical as housing, food and basic supports. By making the connections that lead to wellbeing, long-term transformation for both individuals and communities is possible.

What We Do

We work within a wellbeing framework designed to help people feel more connected to themselves, the land, and others, to build healthier communities and safe, vibrant public spaces. In our wellbeing framework, we’ve identified 6 kinds of connection that are at the heart of what it means to be well:

Connections to body and self
Connections to friends, family and community
Connections to the land
Connections to culture
Connections to the sacred
Connections to one’s purpose, or ‘the human project’

Through Recover, we create opportunities for connections to grow, and work to find more balance between meeting material and non-material needs. We feel that this is where long-term transformation lies, for communities and people alike.

How We Do It

We research and quickly test new ideas and practices that complement or enhance existing practices and services
We include people with lived experience from marginalized communities in the creation of new solutions and build partnerships to strengthen communities’ mutual understanding and respect for each other, and also to create more capacity within communities to nurture wellbeing
We strive to create environments where connections can flourish, both on the small scale, between individuals, and on the larger scale, through policy change at the institutional and systemic levels

We focus on connection as the target outcome, which fundamentally changes the relationship between service providers, the City of Edmonton, and Edmontonians.

Prototypes and Tools

Our prototypes are projects in their infancy, experiments we can quickly act on, test, and iterate. They are meant to test the most uncertain element of an idea or intervention. This allows for lots of learning, some trial and error, agility, and an openness to innovations that can quickly take great ideas to the community and make them happen.

Updates and Current Work

RECOVER continues to focus on experimenting, learning and adapting. We continue to use the wellbeing framework and try to dig deeper - try to apply it with discernment to the prototypes, some of which yield great learnings. We hope to deepen our learnings on local Indigenous perspectives on wellbeing.

The RECOVER team is also making a concerted effort to support complex work internal to the City of Edmonton:

Soloss is now one of the 5 prototypes within the City’s Encampment Strategy
Auricle (another prototype) is being tested in transit spaces in support of transit safety and wellbeing
RECOVER has offered Critical Design Ethnography workshops for staff across a few departments, and intends to offer more workshops.

Soulful City

In 2020, we worked together with our ethnographers, the social design firm InWithForward, to sift through all our research and learnings from previous years and put together a wellbeing framework to guide us in our future work. The resulting document is a deep dive that examines what we really mean by urban wellness and wellbeing.

It combines the stories and lived experiences of street-involved Edmontonians, and draws on their wisdom about what wellbeing means through their eyes. It also pulls together cultural and philosophical teachings from around the world, and from local Indigenous people, to provide a deep understanding of how wellbeing is achieved.

This framework represents our current understanding of wellbeing, and is the lens through which we now view all of our work.

Full Report

Executive Summary

Strategic Alignments

Recover’s work aligns closely with the City of Edmonton’s guiding strategies.

ConnectEdmonton

ConnectEdmonton is the City’s strategic plan for 2019-2028. It provides an inspirational and aspirational view for Edmonton’s future, and outlines the steps we need to take today, and over the next few years, in order to realize this vision by 2050.

The City Plan

The City Plan includes Recover’s work under the pillar ‘Healthy City.’ It reinforces the need for connectedness, and recognizes wellbeing as a key part of health.

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