Wellfair is not a typo

Wellfair merges wellness with fairness. This pairing is long overdue

To make all social action significant and meaningful I suggest the concept of wellfair, which combines wellness with fairness. Whereas wellness is often the target of ameliorative efforts, fairness is the object of transformative ones. Wellfair calls for the indivisibility of wellness and fairness, of happiness and justice, of health and access, of effort and opportunities. Wellfair challenges the duality of internal or external change, of personal improvement or social betterment. We must actively embrace the and; we must repudiate the either/or.

Wellfair calls for meaningful and lasting improvement of the human condition through complementary processes dealing with inevitable pain and eradicating socially created pain; learning how to thrive as an individual and as a collective. The best way to add value to ourselves and to the world, I submit, is through wellfair strategies that eliminate either/or strategies. We must support people with disabilities in their struggle today, but we must also remove barriers for full participation. We must teach people how to cope with inimical conditions, and create opportunities for them to be involved in social change.

We realize that today most resources go towards individualistic wellness approaches, but in the absence of complementary fairness approaches we are destined to forever react to problems without a chance of preventing them in the first place.