The Quality of Life Foundation was set up by design champion and industry leader, Professor Sadie Morgan OBE. She became frustrated with our inability to create homes and communities that are built for the long-term at scale. She felt there was a need to focus the debate around people, their health and wellbeing, and to involve both developers and the general public in how their homes and communities are created.
After a series of conversations with the late Tony Pidgley, CBE, Chairman of founding partner, Berkeley Group, she set up the Foundation as a space for those both inside and outside the built environment industry to focus on what people think and feel about their homes and communities, and work out ways that they might be improved.
To start with, we carried out research to find out what affects people’s quality of life. We used this evidence to build a framework to demonstrate how improvements to our homes and communities can improve our quality of life. Now we are looking at ways to add to increase the evidence base for making health and wellbeing more central, and providing services to provide general uplift and create greater accountability.
Throughout, we have sought ways to engage with the public to understand sentiments at a community level, and to create a system whereby the public can assess individual developments based on its impact on their quality of life.
We will work with developers, local authorities and housing associations to demonstrate how adopting our framework will create long-term social and economic benefits.
