Our Story of

Caring for Collective Wellness

Extraordinary things happen when we dare to step outside our comfort zone, our ‘normal’, our familiar.

When we are prepared to question all that we’ve come to know and believe, when we challenge ourselves, our beliefs, our values – that’s how we arrived here at The Living Project.

This all began in a small Kiwi family decades ago – let’s just call it the “Say I Can!” family.

Four people, very unique individuals, who encouraged and inspired one another to be curious, to question, to wonder, challenge and explore. Four lives. Four journeys. Each taking our own risks, paving our own paths and with every step, learning more about life, about who we are and our place in the world.

​

Our Guiding Principles
What happens when these individual journeys

begin to re-converge?

When all those years of questioning, learning, personal growth and change is brought back together?

What happens when we begin sharing this knowledge and combine our unique skills and talents? When purpose unfolds, and we effectively move from caring for ourselves to caring for one another?

The Living Project. That’s what happens! It’s a vision, an aspiration for a new collective, it’s an extension of the “Say I Can” family. It’s the essential shift from the four of us, to ‘all of us’. An audacious and ambitious project – an extraordinary exercise in uniting people within a common purpose: Caring for Our Collective Wellness.

the living project

Co-Founders

Dana

My parents told me I could do anything I want in life. After years of questioning, trialling and searching I came to realise that life isn’t at all about what I do – it’s about what I love. It’s what inspires me. It’s about living life to the fullest and making the most of what is in front of you. I would have never guessed that I would take on something this ALIVE but where there is passion, there is purpose and The Living Project is a great reflection of what I love about life.

We know we are all unique – early on I was challenged by this – I longed to be normal, to be just like everyone else – instead I was that kid who had to sit out, had to do injections, had to calculate food and exercise. Being a diabetic became a catalyst. I questioned everything. I wanted to be normal, so I looked intently at what that meant and quickly came to realise normal isn’t something I longed for at all. In fact this perception of normal didn’t even make sense.

So here I am – celebrating all of what life entails, using all the experiences, skills and lessons along this journey to transform my life and inspire others on their paths of uniqueness. After all, these are the parts of life that need to be celebrated. These are the connections that need to be made. This is what it means to be human. This is nature interwoven into a perfect balancing act of differences that when combined and in harmony, flourish and thrive.

Contact Dana

Mark

Find your purpose, they said! Your cause! Find your ‘why’! And so I spent years wondering what did that truly mean? Now here I am as a co-creator of The Living Project and Consciously Living – these are both portals to health and wellbeing in our communities. Today, I am totally committed to building a cohesive wellness community for Aotearoa.

What brought me to this point? These past decades provided so many incredible experiences as a family member – a husband, dad, brother, son, and also in my work – as a business owner, a manager, leader, partner, coach, speaker and in life generally. Curiosity kept guiding me towards this deep desire to understand and explore human potential through holistic wellness.

Purpose found me! All experiences helped me here, but one in particular led me to appreciate that everything in my life has purpose – every single person, every situation, circumstance or event. It was this knowing, that gave me the confidence to stop trying, to stop looking for purpose. After that, Consciously Living appeared.

There’s a new vision! This vision is unfolding in the form of The Living Project! A Project that’s being designed to unite us in a shared purpose – the purpose of Caring For Our Collective Wellness. Consciously Living and The Living Project are closely intertwined and unite both my passion and my purpose.

Contact Mark