CPOA - NPO Staff

NPO Staff

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NPO Leadership Team

Laura Lowenthal Bly
Director of Programming and Technical Assistance
lbly@usm.maine.edu

Laura Lowenthal Bly, MSW, has developed a career based on guiding individuals and organizations as they seek to create collaborations, work to thrive through transitions and find innovative ways to ensure sustainability. Since 2001, she has played a key role in designing and implementing sustainable community-based programs for older adults across the U.S. with the Community Partnerships for Older Adults (CPFOA) program. A $28 million initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CPFOA works with communities to design and implement programs that address the current and future needs of older adults in the community. In her role as Co-Director, Ms. Bly has been instrumental in launching CPFOA, guiding its direction, and fostering community partnerships to improve long term care. She has provided expertise and consultation in areas ranging from capacity building to cross-sector collaboration to best practices.

Ms. Bly is mission-driven, and has extensive experience in strategic development, program management and monitoring, marketing, staff development, and communications. She is an expert team leader, facilitator and skilled public speaker. Prior to joining CPFOA, Ms. Bly worked for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she developed and implemented on programs designed to improve the capacity of communities to meet the growing need for long-term supportive services among vulnerable older adults. She has also managed an assisted living home and worked as an assistant to the Vice Provost of Academic Administration at Columbia University.

Laura Lowenthal Bly is certified in the William Bridges model of Leading Organizational and Individual Transition. She earned a Master of Social Work degree from Rutgers University School of Social Work with a concentration in Administration, Policy, and Planning. She has a Certificate in Gerontology, also from Rutgers. She is a member of the American Society on Aging, the Gerontological Society of America, and the National Association of Social Workers.

While Laura Lowenthal Bly has spent a great deal of her career working on issues related to aging, she believes that her greatest skill lies in helping people and organizations make transitions strategically and wisely.

Contact Laura Lowenthal Bly at lbly@usm.maine.edu.

We encourage the reproduction of this material and ask that you credit Community Partnerships for Older Adults Community Partnerships for Older Adults is a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation within the University of Southern Maine
© 2007 Community Partnerships for Older Adults

Strategic Planning - Strategic planning will help you create a bold vision for the future, strengthen new partnerships, forge creative and innovative linkages between stakeholders, and ultimately better address the needs of older adults in your community. A community-wide strategic planning process will benefit from the wisdom of a diverse array of participants and ensure greater likelihood of success.

Inclusion & Diversity - Including older adults and caregivers is crucial to growing and sustaining successful community partnerships. It is especially important to seek participation from traditionally excluded groups such as those defined by race and ethnicity, low income, lack of English language proficiency, and sexual orientation. While many factors can challenge a partnership’s efforts to embrace diversity and build productive relationships, receiving input from a broad array of community members helps to ensure equality in decision making and leads to long term care and supportive services that are more responsive to a community’s diverse needs.

Fiscal Strategies - Developing a fiscal strategy is an important and challenging part of improving the system of long term care and supportive services for older adults in your community. The array of funding options requires that community partnerships be strategic in their aims. This area of the Resource Center reviews relevant funding sources and provides resources to help you make the most of them.

Communications - Have you ever thought about how many times a day someone tries to influence you to think a certain way, to buy a certain product, to support a cause or to change your behavior? These days there are so many ways to reach you—from cell phones and Palm Pilots to instant messaging, cable TV and customized publications—that a reasonable reaction is to simply tune everything out. It’s a world of sound and fury.

Evaluation - While the success of a community partnership may seem self-evident, a systematic evaluation holds members to a higher standard, revealing more than what we see with the naked eye. This section offers an introduction to evaluation. It covers the basic principles of evaluation design and implementation, as well as some topics likely to be important for community partnerships working to improve long term care and supportive services.

Partnership Evolution - A partnership generally consists of multiple organizations and individuals working together under a common vision. Who will be in the partnership varies from community to community, yet the purpose is universal: to create a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to sustain results that are not possible alone.