The practice lead for this area of work is Nina Mguni.

The Young Foundation's work on wellbeing emphasises 'subjective wellbeing', what people feel about the quality of their life. A key element of this is 'resilience', how people bounce back from adversity. Our work includes:

• We have worked with Lord Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, the IDeA and three leading local authorities, Hertfordshire, Manchester and South Tyneside, as the lead partner in the Local Wellbeing Project to look at the different ways in which local government and its local partners can promote wellbeing. The State of Happiness, the final Local Wellbeing Project report, brings together three years of groundbreaking work in the three partner local authority areas as well as other national and international developments in this field.

• Emotional Resilience for Gangs - we have been commissioned by Harrow Metropolitan Police to develop and pilot an emotional resilience programme targeting 14-19 year olds who are offending or at risk of offending, and are associated with gang activity. We are working in collaboration with Dr Ilona Boniwell, one of Europe's leading positive psychologists, to develop this new programme, training professionals in Harrow from Youth Services, the Anti-social Behaviour Unit, Safer Neighbourhoods Team and the Wealdstone Anti-social Behaviour Partnership. Training of professionals and the delivery of the pilot took place in early 2011.

• The Young Foundation has received a grant from Comic Relief to develop and pilot a service to improve the wellbeing and resilience of people aged 65 and over who are experiencing isolation, mild anxiety or depression. Full of Life is a peer-to-peer community based project to promote emotional resilience skills for older people in Kingston and Lambeth.

Key reading:

• Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown argues that building resilience should be a far greater priority in the educational system.

• The State of Happiness highlights how promoting and influencing happiness is no longer an airy aspiration. As the recession forces difficult public spending choices, services focused on wellbeing are delivering widespread economic and social benefits - especially to children.

• Taking the temperature of local communities: The Wellbeing and Resilience Measure - WARM is a new tool that has been developed to make the most of existing data about localities, combining familiar statistics on such things as jobs and health with new ways of thinking about how happy and resilient communities are.