About Us

Mission

Community Partnerships for Older Adults (CPFOA) is a national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help communities develop leadership, innovative solutions and options to meet the needs of older adults over the long term.

Vision

To improve the long term care system by engaging community-based organizations, older adults, policymakers and other stakeholders in determining how to best meet the needs of older adults, ensuring their independence and dignity. Knowing each community faces its own unique challenges and acknowledging there is no “one size fits all” approach to the needs of older adults, solutions must be developed by a diverse group of organizations and individuals within each community.

Background

The American population is growing older and living longer. The long term care system is not prepared to meet these changes, much less fulfill older adults’ expectations – it is under-funded, uncoordinated, biased toward institutional care, and characterized by significant gaps in essential services. The consequences for older adults and their family caregivers can include reduced quality of life, unnecessary health problems, and premature disability.

Who We Are

CPFOA currently supports 16 communities in deciding how best to care for their older adult population now and in the future. Each community has established a partnership that is developing innovative solutions to help older citizens remain in their homes and neighborhoods and to continue to live full, rich lives.

CPFOA has awarded a total of $28 million to these partnerships for planning and implementation. Each community is engaged in:

• Mobilizing their community to improve long term care;
• Strengthening their community’s partnerships;
• Leveraging public and private resources in response to their community’s needs;
• Promoting a better quality of life and care for older adults and their caregivers;
• Enhancing available choices and decision making for older adults and within existing and new programs; and
• Responding to a diverse range of needs of individual caregivers.

The partnerships in the grantee communities are willing to share their principles, tools and lessons learned to help other local communities create environments where everyone can age well.

Unifying Principles

• Partnerships honor, engage, listen and respond to older adults as people.
• Partnerships trust and provide a place to ask for help, knowing someone else may have a solution.
• Partnerships create a “neutral table” and allow members to rise above individual organizational boundaries.
• Partnerships allow groups to address systems change rather than just implementing programs.
• Partnerships enhance local leadership and increase local capacity.
• Partnerships bring non-traditional partners to the table – public, private and non-profit organizations as well as elected officials, business leaders, and educational organizations.
• Partnerships give focus to the overall issue of long term care.
• Partnerships raise the level of awareness of long term care, craft the community’s agenda, and create consensus.
• Partnership structure is critical to addressing the nature of long term care needs, which are holistic and need holistic solutions.
• Partnerships define outcomes and focus on meeting needs, not simply providing services.
• Partnership results are responsive to broader community needs; improving systems for older adults benefits the entire community.
• Partnerships foster shared leadership in response to the real life events in leaders’ lives, including mentoring new leaders.
• Partnerships work to build relationships that lay the groundwork for lasting change.
• Partnership work allows for tackling multiple phases of program planning and implementation at once.