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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.

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.

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.

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.

Impact investments can be used to complement traditional grantmaking and bring promising initiatives to scale. Join Grantmakers In Aging and Grantmakers In Health to learn about strategies to structure and deliver capital to drive and sustain solutions, as well as examples of how funders are leveraging impact investing to advance their missions. 

The field of impact investing has developed over more than five decades, gaining traction as a lever for driving social change and equity, and as a prudent investment strategy. Many types of organizations have taken up the approach, including foundations, faith-based organizations, health systems, pension funds, insurance companies, corporations, wealth managers, banks fulfilling the Community Reinvestment Act, and individuals seeking social and environmental benefits alongside financial returns. Government is also a frequent partner. Still, impact investing is relatively new to many philanthropic funders, which has led trustees, staff, and fiduciaries generally to ask how they could or should apply impact investing and broader social investing techniques to advance their missions and values.