By Sally Gambrell Bridgford Whenever I want to have a great day, I start my morning with a sun salutation as an essential part of my yoga routine. The physical and mental benefits of yoga are well-known — from improved strength, balance, and flexibility, to more energy and better moods overall. Beyond these benefits, hobbies connect us to a community of like-minded enthusiasts while also encouraging us to more intentionally experience awe and wonder. Exploring different hobbies and embracing new experiences are critical components of Living Greatly. That’s why we partnered with award-winning urban strategist Tommi Laitio on his latest research on the value of hobbies as an instrumental part of our Charlotte community fully realizing its purpose. 1. Why are hobbies important to living greatly, particularly in Charlotte? The short answer is that hobbies make people’s eyes light up. A sign of a real hobby is that you could talk about it for hours. In our report, we define a hobby as something done voluntarily and regularly by oneself or with others for enjoyment, relaxation, and pleasure. This means a hobby can be anything from needlework and pickleball to 19th-century dolls or football. Research shows that hobbies bring agency, belonging, and mastery into our lives. Hobbies let us experience joy, relieve stress from school or work, and provide moments of wonder. Having at least one hobby is shown to be associated with fewer depressive symptoms and higher reported health. Hobbies allow us to develop character. They bring new people into our lives. Especially for children, they help build and hold onto an identity, develop and sustain supportive relationships, and bring more trusted adults into their lives. Having a weekly hobby correlates with children feeling less lonely, experiencing less stress, being less bullied, feeling better, and sleeping more. Hobbies also enhance the joy of learning, boost persistence, and teach self-regulation, all of which benefit academic performance. In 2024, I had the opportunity to interview dozens of nonprofit leaders, public servants, and philanthropic leaders on hobbies in Charlotte. What I heard was a desire to rethink the idea of success in Charlotte, especially for children. According to the 2021 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Youth Risk Behavior Survey, only 56 percent of students report feeling good about themselves, a decline from 76 percent in 2013. Almost a third of teens reported that their mental health was most of the time or always “not good.” Hobbies are a simple yet effective way to foster belonging. As one of our interviewees with a long history of youth work in Charlotte said: “What teens need is not difficult. They need fun and creative things to do.” 2. What brought you to begin researching hobbies and their impact? I was a bookish, talkative, and a bit clumsy kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in a small town in Finland. It was the weekend scouting camps and weekly classes in painting and photography that really shaped me into who I am. In my hobbies, I experienced what it means to a child when you see them, when you believe in them, and when you give them responsibility while promising support. That experience is what drove me into youth work, eventually running the city of Helsinki’s Youth Department and then its entire Culture and Leisure Services. In overseeing everything from arts education to swimming halls, making sure that every child had at least one thing in their life that they really enjoyed doing was an annual goal that I needed to report on to the City Council. During that time, I was fortunate to meet Brian Collier. When I moved to the US in 2022, I had the opportunity to work with the Gambrell Foundation team on an expedition to Finland. One of the main issues that moved the participants was this simple idea of hobbies. After the trip, we agreed to try to capture the Finnish model and explore how this idea of hobbies would resonate with the Charlotte Community. 3. What challenges or barriers prevent people from engaging with hobbies in their daily lives, and how can we as a society better address those barriers? The list of main challenges is fairly simple: cost, access, facilities, and transportation. Transportation was mentioned by many as one of the greatest obstacles to real equity. Several interviewees and workshop participants advocated for neighborhood-level investments as a way to counter the limited public transportation and walkability in Charlotte. Next to these obstacles, we know from research that there are barriers that are much more subtle but real. They are things like do you see people like you in the activity, how do you feel about your body, have you had a lot of disappointments in your life, do you know what is available, do your interests differ from those of your friends and is the instruction encouraging or humiliating. To create a truly equitable and enjoyable hobby ecosystem, we need to listen to kids more, try out new things more often, and create opportunities for learning from others. That is why the report advocates for research, capacity building, grants, and place-based investments. 4. What is your personal favorite hobby and why? I am a library lover. I love reading. I read around 40-50 books a year. I read both fiction and nonfiction and increasingly listen to narrative fiction when I go for a walk or even to the gym. I also enjoy running in new cities and neighborhoods. And I want to get back to something that I was doing in Finland, which was live model drawing. I loved it as the two-minute exercises force you to look at the human body very carefully, and you don’t have too much time to criticize your own ideas. 5. What does it mean to you to Live Greatly? The Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen defines a good life as being able to live a life one has reason to value. “Reason to value” means that you know what’s available, you have the rights, access, and resources to utilize the choices around you, and you have agency to assemble your own life so that it looks like yours and nobody else’s. My “reason to value” is feeling like I leave a positive handprint in the lives of people and places around me, tasting and doing new things frequently, being wrong and having to adjust my thinking often enough, and the simple pleasures of going to our country house in Finland, chopping wood, carrying water, lighting the fireplace in the sauna, and sitting on the porch waiting for the sauna to warm up and listening to the sounds of the stream behind the building.
