Oasis Institute
Advancing the human capacity to flourish.
We study how human beings regulate, adapt, connect and transform, and translate what we learn into practical methods for human development.
Not research into temporary relief. Research into what lets a human life become more resilient, conscious, connected and fully lived.
A New Zealand wellbeing research institute · Est. 2022
01The Next Frontier Is Human
We have built extraordinary systems for understanding the world. We have not built equally powerful systems for understanding the human being.
Artificial intelligence is expanding access to knowledge, capability and creation at a scale previously unimaginable. But greater capability does not automatically produce greater clarity, resilience, wisdom or wellbeing.
The systems that shape human experience, from emotion and physiology to behaviour, relationships and environment, remain fragmented across disciplines and institutions. Oasis Institute exists to study them together.
Our ambition is to build a rigorous, practical and evolving body of knowledge about how people change, what makes that change endure, and how human beings can flourish in an age of abundance.
02The Research Problem
Human wellbeing is studied in parts. It is lived as a whole.
A person does not experience emotion separately from the body, behaviour separately from relationships, or stress separately from environment. These systems interact continuously.
Yet much of research and practice remains organised around isolated symptoms, individual disciplines and short-term interventions. Oasis is developing and testing an integrated model of human wellbeing: one capable of examining the whole system without losing scientific precision.
03Questions Worth Building an Institute Around
Four questions at the centre of the work.
- 01
How does meaningful change begin?
Does lasting change begin through awareness, physiological regulation, behavioural understanding or relational safety, or through the interaction between them?
- 02
Why does some change endure?
What transforms a temporary insight or moment of relief into a durable shift in the way a person lives?
- 03
Can flourishing be understood as a system?
Can emotional, behavioural, physiological and relational wellbeing be studied together, without reducing the person to a diagnosis or a single score?
- 04
What will wellbeing require in the age of AI?
As intelligence and capability become abundant, which human capacities become more important, not less?
04The Framework
MABERT
A framework for integrated human development.
MABERT is the Institute's developing framework for understanding and supporting change across the emotional, behavioural, physiological and relational dimensions of human experience. Grounded in decades of applied practice, it is now being formalised into a structured model for research, measurement and education.
05From Lived Practice to Formal Knowledge
We treat three decades of practice as the beginning of the research, not a substitute for it.
Many important fields begin with sustained observation before they acquire formal models, common measures and established research traditions. Oasis begins with more than three decades of applied practice, and the repeated patterns observed across individuals, families, professionals, children and communities.
The ambition is not simply to validate a programme. It is to contribute new knowledge about how human change happens.
- Observe
- Formalise
- Measure
- Test
- Publish
- Apply
06Field Notes
The latest in human wellbeing.
We are early. We are serious. The problem is enormous. We intend to build.