Shaping Lifelong Health
Challenge Theme

About the Challenge

The Shaping Lifelong Health Challenge is the Central Coast Living Lab’s new initiative, focused on prevention from midlife onwards. It brings together community members, carers, services, researchers and partners to create opportunities for people to live well and thrive into later life.

Together, we can build opportunities that make it easier for people to live well and thrive at every stage of life.

Our focus

This Challenge explores three key themes:

Healthy Bodies: moving well, nutrition and oral health

Healthy Minds: brain health, dementia risk reduction and digital inclusion

Healthy Participation: age-friendly places, purpose and contribution

What we’ll do together

Over the coming months we’ll follow these steps:

  1. Community consultation – workshops and conversations with local groups and individuals.

  2. Sharing insights – feeding back community priorities in a plain-language summary.

  3. Collaboration – inviting services, researchers and partners to propose ideas through an Expression of Interest (EOI).

  4. Piloting projects – selected projects will be supported for development and testing.

Get involved

Here’s how you can be part of shaping this Challenge:

  • Join our community conversation workshop on 30 September in Gosford. Click here to learn more: Community Conversations workshop

  • Stay in the loop by signing up up for our mailing list to receive the Insights Summary in October.

  • Submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) later this year for the chance to collaborate on pilot projects — a small number will be selected for support and further development.

  • Partner with us - contact the team at ccll@newcastle.edu.au to explore opportunities.

Why it matters

By age 65, two in three Australians are living with at least one chronic condition, and nearly half live with two or more (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022). Dementia is now the second leading cause of death (ABS, 2022), and social isolation remains a powerful predictor of poor health outcomes.

The good news is prevention works. Healthy habits, strong social connections and supportive environments in our 40s–60s can delay or prevent illness, frailty and decline. Every $1 invested in prevention is estimated to return about $14 in health and social benefits (Australian Government, National Preventive Health Strategy, 2021).

Curious about how we approach innovation?

We use a Living Lab approach to bring people together to design, test, and deliver real-world solutions.