Best Practice: Balbriggan created a wellbeing map and people love it

We spoke to Thrive chairperson Joe McKenna about the map and the award win.

“We needed something more Balbriggan-centric to put a real identity on the project. We kind of rammed our heads together to see what we could do and came across a wellbeing map for Wexford, for the entire county, appealing to children. It was a really cool idea, a massive project covering the whole county. The places were colour coded (based) on how they made people feel,” he said.

His group decided to try out the same idea in Balbriggan.

“We did a survey over a number of months for people to tell us where in Balbriggan made them feel energised, made them feel at peace, made them feel at one with nature, made them feel relaxed. We got hundreds of responses, fed them into a database and we came up with a selection of the top places in the town,” said Joe.

Once they knew what to include the next step was to package it in a way that would capture the imagination. The town’s art scene is growing in recent years so they put the word out that they were looking for an artist to design their map.

“We ended up with a girl called Lauren Fernandes who was really fantastic. We picked her because we wanted it to be really child-friendly. We wanted it to catch the eye of young people. If you have a map and it looks exciting and kid friendly, they are going to make their parents or grandparents take them there.”

It soon became apparent to Thrive Balbriggan that they had succeeded.

“We noticed that we weren’t the only people handing out this map. Other people were handing it out. We said to ourselves then ‘This thing is doing exactly what we wanted it to do’. We were never thinking about awards, but Fingal County Council had supported the map and they nominated us for the LAMA award which we won and that was great.”

Joe feels there are a lot of things on the map which people might take for granted or almost forget due to their familiarity.

“Ardgillan Castle is on it, as a natural spot that is very relaxing. Things like the library are relaxing, the Lark Theatre in Balbriggan which won a new building of the year award last year. That’s there for people’s wellbeing. You have Bremore Castle as well, you have the sports clubs.

In his day job Joe works as a team leader delivering the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme for Empower, a local development company supporting communities in Fingal, Clonsilla, Mulhuddart and Balbriggan.

“We had this message at the start that you have to love where you live, but you have to make where you live lovable, in a certain way. Our aim was to get people to notice all of the things around them that they maybe don’t appreciate enough. That’s where it went and people were saying ‘Oh, I forgot that was there’. People new to the town didn’t know that some of the things even existed.”

The map will be updated in the future. This is what it looks like:

“The town of Balbriggan is going through a huge regeneration and this map is something that we could update down the line. It’s sustainable as an idea, because it will become dated and we will need to do it again. The fact that we have had such success this time means that next time we will probably get more support,” he said.

Thrive Balbriggan is one of a threesome of projects supported by Mental Health Ireland. There is a neighbouring project in Swords and Thrive Connemara was launched in Clifden last year, with plans for more in other places.

You can follow Thrive Balbriggan on Facebook and Instagram: @ThriveBalbriggan

To learn more about Thrive nationally, visit: https://www.mentalhealthireland.ie/project/thrive-ireland/