Resource Library

Across the United States, Multisector Plans for Aging are driving public-private partnerships at the highest level of state government. Globally, 128 countries have national or subnational plans on aging. These plans have the potential to influence policies and funding mechanisms across sectors with corresponding metrics to track impact.

This guide takes a deep dive into the topic of impact investing and highlights funders across the GIA network and beyond who are leveraging impact investments to create healthier, more age-integrated communities.

Social isolation is an epidemic in the United States, affecting two-thirds of older adults and three-quarters of young people (as reported during COVID). Social isolation is linked to depression, poor sleep, and impaired immunity. It increases the risks of dementia by 50 percent, stroke by 32 percent, and coronary heart disease by 29 percent, and significantly increases the risk of premature death from all causes.

Age-Friendly Health Systems aim to follow an essential set of evidence-based practices; cause no harm; and align with what matters to older adults and their caregivers. This issue brief provides background on the need and an update on a new movement that seeks to transform how our healthcare system approaches the care of older adults.

This report examines the mobility challenges that confront older people in rural communities across America and profiles some of the programs that exist to support them.

This report from Grantmakers In Aging, seeks to capture a range of promising approaches to aging in community being used globally.  
 

This funding guide offers grantmaking recommendations to help funders become engaged in rural mobility and suggests a dynamic research and policy agenda to empower older people in rural places to lead fuller lives. 

The Future of Rural Transportation and Mobility for Older Adults is a companion white paper to GIA’s Mobility & Aging in Rural America: The Role for Innovation. The paper examines rural mobility through a lens of technology and across a longer timeframe.

This guide examines the crisis caused by opioids in rural communities, particularly the impact on the lives of many older individuals, potential solutions, and initiatives that governments, communities and funders are implementing.

Explore the economic, social, and personal benefits of making a community more age-friendly.

For older people whose social networks are dwindling, arts and culture give opportunities to keep socially, civically, and mentally active in their communities. The arts provide a symbolic and emotionally expressive communication system for elders with cognitive limitations, allowing them to engage with their care partners and the larger community.

How do we build on the age-friendly community movement's successes to date and accelerate sustainable progress at local, state, national, and international levels? Grantmakers In Aging (GIA) brought together national and international leaders to explore a variety of issues related to the concept and to its sustainability. Through key informant interviews, focus groups, and a two-day leadership summit held in September 2015 in Washington, DC, we distilled best practices in sustainable age-friendly communities work that resulted in the framework presented in this document. This framework is an important outcome of GIA’s Community AGEnda initiative, a three-year effort to increase age-friendly activities in selected United States regions that was supported by The Pfizer Foundation.

Community AGEnda, the age-friendly initiative of Grantmakers in Aging, has released a new age-friendly community toolkit. This exciting new resource is available to advocates for age-friendly communities around the world and addresses the challenge in communicating effectively about this promising idea. Learn to how to create more effective messages, shape brochures, and frame public communications campaigns. Toolkit partners such as WHO Age-Friendly Cities, AARP Livable Communities and AARP International, The Village to Village Network, N4A, the AdvantAGE Initiative contributed their valuable experience and research.

View ways to make your community more age-friendly with this infographic.

Learn how to create more effective messages or talking points, develop printed materials, and frame public communications campaigns.

Explore new, transformative ways of thinking about aging and community development. 

Older adults can be a vital asset to communities and community development, contributing their experience, leadership, and, often, economic participation. Unfortunately, most live in places that are not well prepared for an aging population, and most communities have a long way to go before they can be called “age-friendly” – that is, great places to grow up and grow old.

GIA has identified age-friendly community development as an issue of great promise and compelling need, with enormous potential for important contributions by funders.