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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.
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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.
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> Fiscal Strategies > Housing

Housing

Housing is one of the most commonly cited needs when communities take inventory of resources for older persons. But housing alone is not usually what is needed; rather, what’s often lacking in communities is an adequate range of housing options, packaged with services that prevent people from being placed unnecessarily in nursing homes as their needs change and fully independent living becomes impossible.

Moreover, while it may be tempting to focus all energy on new housing, it’s important to keep in mind that the majority of older adults (80%) are homeowners who want to age in place. For that reason, programs targeted at homeowners can often reach the largest number of people.

This section discusses financing resources available to address a range of housing options including adding services or making changes to a person’s existing home, or building new facilities designed for older persons who have changing needs.

Most of the funding sources discussed here are specific to housing. For more information about financing applicable services, see Funding Sources for Services Related to Housing.

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Three Principles in Housing-finance Strategy
Financing a range of housing options can be very complex, and as examples will show, usually involve combinations of federal, state and local funding. A range of models is available for replication, but any given model may or may not meet your community needs. To help work through decisions and clarify needs, communities should keep three fundamental principles in mind when planning their housing-finance strategy: availability, accessibility and affordability.

Developing Housing Options: New Construction and Rehabilitation
This section provides an overview of the process for developing new housing, links to funding sources and real examples of housing developed by communities.

Existing Housing
This section covers financing mechanisms that make existing housing available, accessible and affordable to older persons. It also addresses related housing strategies that apply regardless of whether public subsidies exist.
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