Case Study: Age-Friendly Communities
GOAL:
With the aging of the Baby Boom generation, communities are grappling with questions about how to remain attractive and safe for older citizens who want to age in the places where they have existing rich networks of friends and family or who want to relocate to places that offer amenities that appeal to a retirement lifestyle. The “Age-Friendly Community” (AFC)movement, promoted by the AARP and World Health Organization, encourages communities to consider the programs, services, and infrastructure needed to provide a vibrant environment for aging citizens.
CHALLENGE:
In northern New Jersey, two foundations have been partnering to offer start-up grants and support to communities interested in becoming more age-friendly. While their funding efforts have mobilized and launched early AFC projects, the funders have wanted to push their grantee communities to consider how the nascent work will be sustained and expanded once the grant funding is gone.
SOLUTION:
Strategic Doing, an agile collaboration methodology, was used with AFC grant recipients to consider how to sustain and scale their efforts. A Strategic Doing workshop was held for 80 grantees from 12 northern NJ communities. Participants were presented with five sustainability principles to consider in planning how to continue to advance the AFC work in their communities: build public will, engage across sectors, utilize metrics, secure resources, andadvance age-friendly policies, practice, and funding.1 Each community group worked together at small table to consider the four guiding questions of Strategic Doing: What could we do? What should we do? What will we do? How will we be accountable to each other to continue moving forward? By the end of the workshop, each community group defined a strategic opportunity they wanted to pursue to sustain their AFC efforts, identified a “Pathfinder Project” as a specific commitment to action to advance the opportunity, and created a 30-day plan involving all group members to accomplish their project.
OUTCOMES AND IMPACTS:
Within a few weeks of the workshop’s conclusion, the coronavirus shut down northern New Jersey, so plans to advance the age-friendly community initiatives developed during the workshop were put on hold. However, a collateral benefit that emerged during the covid-19 onset was the expanded personal networks that were created during the workshop became in some cases important avenues to prepare aging citizens for managing virus precautions.