Back from New York City!

I got back from New York City last night. There is a pond in Central Park there, full of turtles! It's like a lake of dancing giggles.

We did our first train the trainer session for Open Center in NYC, and gave a talk. The house was not packed, but it was truly the quality not quantity of people. The Executive Director of Open Center attended our talk on Friday night – his birthday! And then he came back on St. Patrick’s day for the class. Here is what he said: "My sense that this is the wave of the future was only strengthened by my experience with the Happiness Initiative.”

Guess who else came to our talk? Jon Hall, formerly of the OECD and currently working at the United Nations on…measuring progress!!! Well, wow.

It was such an honor to spend time with these people, and to be able to talk about the project and facilitate them in the steps of a Happiness Initiative in NYC. It was also really cool to see the turtles.

I have so much I want to blog about, and so much is going on, but ran out of daylight, and will soon run out of night too, so best wait for tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a sneak preview of the newsletter we will issue tomorrow:

Spring Equinox and a new moon rising Give | Take the Survey | Check out the happiness report card

The Happiness Initiative is going to the UN! Dear {FIRST_NAME}, It's pretty exciting! We have been invited to the Big Apple by the government of Bhutan and the United Nations to a High Level Meeting on Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining A New Economic Paradigm. The purpose of the meeting is to launch an economic system based on wellbeing and sustainability. We will join leaders from around the globe, and represent the work you and I are doing to spread happiness initiatives. It is thanks to all of you who have worked with us, and who will work with us, that this project has been honored with an invitation to this meeting. I will post to the happiness initiative blog about the meeting, so stay tuned! Last, please give to the Happiness Initiative. We so believe in this project, but must have your support to keep it going. Please give what you comfortably can. Click here to donate. In Gratitude, Laura Musikanski Executive Director The Happiness Initiative

Coming in August: train the trainer sessions and a conference!! Last week we conducted our first Train the Trainer session in New York City's Open Center. The session was inspiring, with New Yorkers gathering to plan how to bring the word of transformation from a purely money-based system to one aimed at well-being and sustainability for all. As the Executive Director of Open Center kept saying "If you can make it here, you can make it any where." With New York as our trial run, we are gearing up for a two day Train the Trainer session August 23 & 24th. We are limiting attendance to 20 people, and rates are dirt cheap. If you are interested, send us an email atinfo@happycounts.org and we will send you more information. The Train the Trainer will be followed by a two day conference in Seattle on August 25 & 26th. We will have a full schedule soon, so stay tuned!

The National Happiness Report Card is up! Over 10,000 people have taken the Happiness Initiative survey since November of 2011, with between 25-200 people taking it each day. In total over 23,000 people have taken the survey since we first put it online early 2011. The National Happiness Report Card is ready for your view. It includes results from a national random sample compared to the opt-in (meaning people volunteered to go online and take the survey) survey results and shows the objective metrics beside the survey results to give a balanced picture. We will have deeper analysis soon. In the meantime, we are partnering with Compassionate Action Network in Seattle to use the Happiness Initiative survey to measure compassion in a the city. Join us March 31, 2012 from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. at the Center for Spiritual Living for “A Call for Compassion: Collective Impact 2012”.