Advancing insights on how local leaders work with others to make their communities better places to grow up and grow old
A global age-friendly movement is underway to make cities, towns, and neighborhoods better places to thrive as we age. This movement highlights how our experiences of aging depend on the social, built, and service environments of our local communities. The Age-Friendly Research Team at the Rutgers Hub for Aging Collaboration has partnered with local leaders across New Jersey since 2016 to understand how individuals, groups, and organizations work to make their communities more age-friendly.
Age-friendly community work is fundamentally oriented to improving communities. The individuals and organizations involved with AFC initiatives tend to be those who are expressly dedicated to the people and places of their communities. AFC efforts are a civic enterprise–operating as part of the activities and duties through which people relate to their town or city. Read more.
Individuals, groups, and networks drive age-friendly work forward. While technical skills like working with data are important, it is just as essential to create and sustain relationships and build public will for addressing issues of aging within communities. Read more.
Recognizing older adults as a large and diverse population group, and especially when considering age at the intersection of other social positions (e.g., race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, LGTBQ+, disability), there is no “one and done” arrangement for optimizing community contexts for aging: there are many forms for core functions. Read more.
A major contribution of the age-friendly communities movement is its emphasis on the role of localities—such as cities, neighborhoods, and towns—in shaping landscapes for aging. At the same time, our research has demonstrated that localities do not operate in a vacuum and actions at higher systems levels matter for success at the local level, and vice-versa. Read more.
Improving communities requires innovation, influxes of ideas, and multiple modes of problem-solving. If one community is facing a particular barrier, chances are that another community has found creative ways around that barrier in the past. By bringing together community leaders who have worked on a wide array of pioneering work, leaders can learn from each other. Read more.
There is no one sustainability destination or pathway for age-friendly community initiatives. Instead, sustaining these community-level aging initiatives requires viewing sustainability, implementation, and impact as interwoven processes across multiple dimensions and systems levels. Read more.
The Age-Friendly Research Team began working with communities in northern North Jersey in 2016 when eight communities received funding for age-friendly planning and implementation projects from The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation and the Grotta Fund for Older Adults at the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey.
These philanthropic organizations funded our team to conduct a developmental evaluation of the regional grantmaking program. Developmental evaluation involves studying new program models as they evolve and emerge over time. This type of evaluation draws on action research methods to understand new interventions and contribute to their formative development.
In 2021, our project grew to include new forms of research and practice. We created a new administrative structure called Age-Friendly North Jersey with the two philanthropic organizations. Our team received a grant to co-administer AFNJ while continuing our longitudinal evaluation and research work with the age-friendly community initiatives. As co-administrators, we develop and implement professional development webinars, cultivate leadership among age-friendly leaders, and coordinate state-level age-friendly advocacy.
Our age-friendly research and practice, and relationship with the funders, continues on in new and dynamic ways, exploring pressing issues advancing place-based social innovations for aging.
In addition to our role as researchers, we engage in age-friendly practice. We do this by leading and actively participating in inter-organizational groups advancing the Age-Friendly Communities Movement in New Jersey and beyond. Our direct engagement in age-friendly practice serves as important background for our scholarship and reflects our commitment to cross-sectoral collaboration for social impact.
*background photo credit Tom Franklin
Age-Friendly North Jersey is an alliance of leaders strengthening communities for all ages. It includes individuals, groups, and organizations from more than 20 communities across six counties in New Jersey. The formation of the alliance was fueled by the Age-Friendly Research Team’s evaluation findings that age-friendly community leaders valued opportunities to connect with, learn from, and coordinate action with their peers from other communities.
The Collaborative is a cross-sectoral network of organizations committed to advancing the age-friendly communities movement across New Jersey. Its goal is to expand and strengthen local age-friendly efforts across New Jersey’s diverse communities, as well as to advance age-friendly policy principles at the state level. The Age-Friendly Research Team is an active member of this network.
The Council was a Governor-appointed committee led by the New Jersey Department of Human Services, Division of Aging Services. Membership included individuals from state government agencies, as well as statewide nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and higher education. The Council concluded its work in August 2023, advising the State on the development of a blueprint to foster age-friendly communities. This work emanated from the State joining the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities in 2021.
This network is a national group of organizations that are supporting age-friendly communities within a specific region. The group formed from a collaborative session at the American Society on Aging conference in 2022. The Age-Friendly Research Team at the Rutgers Hub for Aging Collaboration helped to establish the network in partnership with the University of Maine Center on Aging.
Browse below to learn more about findings from this project. For a full list of publications, click here.
Prior studies highlighted that events are deliberately multi-organizational, multi-sectoral, and multi-level and can help to further propel the age-friendly movement toward systems change for aging in community. This paper explores how the 2022 Age-Friendly Virtual Fair exemplifies and extends these findings beyond local community development toward state-level ecosystems.
Despite the heightened need for community supports during the COVID-19 pandemic, very little research has addressed the work of age-friendly community (AFC) initiatives in the context of the crisis. This paper summarizes distinct roles of AFC initiatives–as well as the types of human, tangible, and social capital they drew upon–as they served older adults during the pandemic.
The Age-Friendly Communities Movement has long centered the involvement of older adults’ participation in changemaking efforts. But how exactly are older adults engaging in this work? This article delineates five categories of participation (consumer, informant, task assistant, champion, core group members) and describes implications for practice and research.
Multisectoral collaboration is considered essential for age-friendly community change. This article discusses the ways in which age-friendly organizations interact and the implications of this characterization for guiding research, evaluation, and policy to optimize AFCI implementation and impact across diverse settings.
Events are commonly recognized as key practice elements of implementing AFC initiatives, but their specific strategic yield is little understood. This study explores how AFC leaders facilitate events and what they perceive as the value of events, theorizing that events can strategically build relational capacity to sustain age-friendly progress within broader community systems.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders of AFCIs in northern New Jersey, this study develops an empirically-based logic model for the initiatives in the early planning phase. AFCI leaders can draw on this model to evaluate AFCI processes and outcomes in their formative stages, as well as to strategically plan for the start of an AFCI within a given locality.
This report explores age-friendly progress among a cohort of age-friendly initiatives seven years into their implementation process. The report focuses on the range of accomplishments achieved by the initiatives and the variation in operational statuses as the initiatives worked to navigate beyond their initial grantmaking program.
This blog post describes how social network visualizations can help to make visible the relational work of age-friendly community initiatives.
This report provides an overview of the people, groups, and organizations mobilized for social change on aging as part of pioneering grant-funded age-friendly community initiatives in New Jersey.
This report describes the activities and outputs of nine grant-funded age-friendly community initiatives during the first year of implementing their action plans.
This report shares the initial actions that nine grant-funded age-friendly community initiatives undertook to better understand their communities and begin to engage with stakeholders, in advance of developing their action plans.
This paper works to enrich age-friendly multi-sector practice by highlighting how prominent theories and frameworks of community community collaboration (asset-based community development, strategic doing, collective impact) can enhance the work of engagement, planning, implementation, and measurement. This paper further encourages researchers and practitioners to approach age-friendly work from a community-building approach.
Introducing a special age-friendly focused issues of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy, this paper describes the growth and progress of the age-friendly movement and the corresponding body of research exploring these social innovations. In addition to highlighting the articles in the special issue, this essay further identified key challenges for age-friendly practice and policy spanning impact, reach, and sustainability.
This article highlights the ways in which social inequalities and spatial justice manifest in age-friendly work. While not specifically designed to address inequality, age-friendly efforts are poised to advance policies at the local level that can reduce spatialized population health disparities in later life. However, age-friendly efforts can also exacerbate placed-based aging inequalities to the extent that communities with greater pre-existing capital are more likely to engage in age-friendly work.
This synthesis review (currently under review) aims to build theory on the ways the public sector is involved in AFC efforts, specifically in Canada and the United States. This paper aims to move the field from broad calls for public sector involvement to offer a specific conceptual framework for the range of ways in which the public sector can lead and support AFC change efforts.
This presentation by Dr. Emily Greenfield explores insights about how to build upon and expand the growing age-friendly movement in New Jersey within Bergen County. Drawing upon multi-years of community-engaged research, this presentation highlights the types of resources needed to advance age-friendly efforts, as well as several key practice recommendations to build and sustain these efforts.
The Age-Friendly Virtual Fair featured 34 “table” presentations that showcased the diverse age-friendly work throughout New Jersey, including topics such as home- and community-based services, arts, transportation, LGBTQ+ aging, research, getting started, age-inclusivity within higher education, age-friendly health systems, and more. (Fair organized in partnership among the Rutgers Hub for Aging Collaboration, The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation, The Grotta Fund for Older Adults, and New Jersey Advocates for Aging Well)
This program presents an overview of municipal committees on aging in New Jersey as a key structure to advance age-friendly community progress. It also features speakers from communities in both northern and southern New Jersey, who describe ways in which older adults can be involved in and benefit from such committees. (Presentation organized in honor of Older Americans Month in May 2023 in partnership with the Rutgers Hub for Aging Collaboration, Age-Friendly North Jersey, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Rutgers)
This presentation features Dr. Emily Greenfield (Director of the Hub for Aging Collaboration), who provides a conceptual overview of community gerontology and how it can spur multisectoral, sustainable, and equitable community-based social innovations for aging. (Presentation organized by the Gilbrea Centre at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada)
This panel provides an overview of the age-friendly community grantmaking program through Age-Friendly North Jersey. It features key research findings of the Rutgers Age-Friendly Research Team, alongside local leaders’ experiences of planning and implementing age-friendly community initiatives since 2015. (Panel organized as part of a meeting of the New Jersey Age-Friendly Advisory Council meeting)
Reach out to the Age-Friendly Research Team if you are interested in learning more about our work or collaborating on future projects.
