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The Aging Together Partnership

Address
		420 Southridge Parkway
		Suite 106
		Culpeper, Virginia
		22701
Web site
		www.agingtogether.org
Contact
		Sallie Morgan
		540-829-6405

Over 100 organizations and individuals came together to form the Aging Together Partnership in the rural Rappahannock Rapidan region of Virginia. Five Community Conversations were held involving 900 people in five counties, who were asked about their perception of needs and possible solutions. The partnership found that long term care issues were not on the agenda of local governments or incorporated into their planning efforts while at the same time community members were ready to address the difficulties older adults and their families were having finding, accessing and affording support. The long range impact the partnership seeks is: Older adults and their families will have access to an expanded range of options for long term care and supportive services; and communities and decision-makers will value older adults and their families and consider their needs and preferences in all local planning.

Successes:

Aging Together partners collaborated on the opening of Daybreak, a new regional adult day care center, serving individuals from four counties.
The Aging Together Partnership assisted the Rappahannock Rapidan Community Services Board/Area Agency on Aging in obtaining funding from the Virginia Healthcare Foundation to help low-income adults obtain free prescription medicine to deal with the high cost of their medications.
County Teams are working to create networks of volunteer drivers to help older adults who cannot drive get to medical appointments and conduct other business in the community.
The Partnership’s regional Workforce Development Group collaborated with Germanna Community College to design and offer a series of classes for supervisors and direct care staff, designed to promote retention of workers in long term and acute health care.
Partnership is Making the Case for Elder Law Services - read the full story.

Real Life Impact:

Mrs. M, age 63, was diagnosed with angina, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Her husband’s employer-provided health insurance coverage ended when he was unable to return to work after an accident. Since Mrs. M had been insured under the policy, she lost her coverage as well. She couldn’t pay for the prescription drugs so she stopped taking her medications. Within two months, she was hospitalized for chest pains and her injured husband was left without a caregiver. She had neglected her own health in order to care for her husband and now both were in danger. Fortunately, she was hospitalized in time, went home with medications and was connected with the Medication Assistance Program. Through this program and collaboration with her physician, Mrs. M was able to get the medicine she needed at no cost. Now she takes her medications regularly, and the Medication Assistance Program keeps track of her refill information so she doesn’t run out. Luckily her heart was not damaged and today she is back to her normal routine as a homemaker and caregiver.

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.