Resource Library

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.

Part of Grantmakers In Aging’s Moving Ahead Together initiative, supported by Gilead Sciences, this document offers a detailed framework of recommendations for strengthening the integration of HIV and aging care and services through increased understanding, more customized programs, closer cross-sector connection, and stronger policymaking. Three main sections. Focus Area #1: Complexities and Challenges, explores the broader social context, including stigma. Focus Area #2: Integrating and Improving Care and Services, emphasizes the need for whole-person care and examines medical care, mental and behavioral health care, and social and psychosocial support. Focus Area #3: The Way Forward, looks at policy and how to update it to reflect the graying of HIV.

This report summarizes key issues relevant to understanding complex care and offers resources and case studies for funders interested in entering the field or deepening their existing work. It also profiles funding opportunities, explores existing models, and shares philanthropic lessons learned.

GIA recorded a series of interviews with older people living with HIV/AIDS reflecting on their lived experience.

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

Our 2019 funding guide, Aging Positively: Bringing HIV/AIDS into the Aging Services Mainstream: An Introduction for Funders, highlights the diverse experiences of older people living with HIV/AIDS and offers actionable ideas for philanthropies of all kinds to improve care and quality of life. 

​Honoring the Denver Principles and MIPA (Meaningful Involvement of People with HIV/AIDS), GIA also recorded a series of interviews with older people living with HIV/AIDS and produced the following videos reflecting on their lived experience.

Evidence-based programs (EBPs) are essential for promoting healthy aging and wellness in older adults. These programs address challenges such as chronic conditions, falls, physical inactivity, and behavioral health issues, which can impact health, well-being, and independence. 

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

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.