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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.
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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.
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> Inclusion & Diversity > Demographics

Demographics

Demographic changes in the United States over the past 40 years have dramatically affected the way programs and policies affecting older adults and their caregivers are designed, developed and implemented.

This section provides an overview of these changes, which professionals in aging services need to understand as they plan services, including:

  • key trends impacting social policy for older adults;
  • the impact of the U.S. Census Bureau's new approach to race and ethnicity; and
  • additional demographic details that illustrate the diversity of the older adult population.

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Demographics of Race/Ethnicity: A New Approach by the U.S. Census Bureau
The racial and ethnic categories used in the 2000 census have sparked debate about how these new ways of describing the population affects the allocation of federal resources and legislative redistricting. In addition, some argue that the categories make the idea of race and ethnicity more confusing. This section discusses the benefits and challenges of these new ways of describing the population and summarizes some of the characteristics of older adults counted by the 2000 census.

Population Trends
The proportion of the U.S. population over age 65 is growing, with notable increases in the oldest age categories. This population is also becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. This section describes some of these demographic changes and the challenges faced by those who plan and provide long term care and supportive services.

Other Demographic Factors
In addition to race and ethnicity, many other demographic characteristics are used to describe the older adult population. This section discusses urban vs. rural residence; gender; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT); income level and education as other relevant demographic elements.
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