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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.
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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Stories

Just1Call
An innovative program in North Carolina puts seniors, disabled adults one call away from wealth of helpful information
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Volunteer Drivers Wanted
Riverside County’s TRIP Program Provides Frail, Homebound, and Isolated Seniors with an Inexpensive and Reliable Transportation Option
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Senior Academies Cultivate Civic Leadership, Involvement Among Older People
Senior academies are programs that teach older people how to effect change in their communities through greater civic involvement. In this story senior academy programs in three communities are described.
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Study Circles Lead to Action on Aging
Last May, over one hundred people in ten small Vermont towns got together in four weekly study circles to learn about long term care issues, reflect upon their own experiences, and suggest ways to make life better for people who need long term care. By the end of the month, many participants were ready to move beyond studying and talking and into local action.
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The Power of Building Senior Leadership: The Haywood Community Connections Partnership works to train a county full of leaders to advocate for the aging population
Victoria Young describes Haywood County, North Carolina, as a “very special place.” The county of about 57,000 residents is tucked beside the Great Smoky Mountains National park and is just 40 or so miles from Asheville, a city that mixes old-time North Carolina charm with plenty of culture and energy.
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Art and Number Crunching: Michigan’s Blueprint for Aging Partnership uses hard data and an art show to communicate about the growing older population.
In 2008, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Blueprint for Aging Partnership held an art show. But this was no ordinary art show: Instead of a modest event featuring a few pieces of art from local hobbyists, Blueprint for Aging linked up with the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design and put out a national call for artists to submit their works that “challenge and expand the perception of aging.” The event, “Aging with Attitude,” opened in a local gallery to a packed house marveling at the art submitted by scores of artists from around the country.
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In Culpeper, VA, the work of the Aging Together Partnership brings many paybacks to the communities it serves!
For both people and organizations, it’s wonderful to receive praise. A well-earned commendation can make a particularly challenging project even more worthwhile. And an acknowledgement of a community group’s good deeds can be a great motivator.
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Bridging the Cultural Divide:The Pathways to Positive Aging Partnership of the City of Fremont, CA and Tri-City Elder Coalition
In the last three decades, the cities of Fremont, Union City and Newark, California have experienced a tremendous demographic shift. What once was a region where roughly 8 in every 10 residents was Caucasian has morphed into a veritable melting pot of ethnicities and nationalities.
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Spreading the word: Seniors Count Partnership of Manchester, N.H., takes to the airwaves to raise awareness of frail seniors
Getting the general public to take notice of aging issues is difficult enough. But what about drawing attention to one of the least visible segments of the aging population?
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Culpeper, Virginia: Partnership is Making the Case for Elder Law Services
Sometimes, a partnership blooms in the most unlikely of places. That’s certainly what happened at Aging Together, a regional partnership of more than 100 organizations and individuals serving a five-county region in north central Virginia.
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Partnership is key when tackling housing issues for older adults in Atlanta
When tackling housing issues of older adults meant spearheading a region-wide change in zoning ordinances, the Aging Atlanta Partnership realized it needed help.
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Elder Care Advocate Program in Jacksonville Product of Partnering
As Dorothy recited in Oz, “There's no place like home.” Certainly in the case of a hospital stay the best part is going home, but sometimes that transition is anything but smooth. For some older adult patients, a hospital stay may be extended only because arrangements for long-term care aren't in place or because services to ensure the senior's well-being at home haven't been arranged. Worse yet, some vulnerable elderly patients, discharged without a thorough follow-up plan, find themselves returning to the hospital rapidly because those unmet needs have caused a crisis. Poor pre-discharge assessment, lack of communication and thinly stretched services all contribute to this malfunctioning system.
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All the Lonely People? Not with GIS Mapping
Seeing the benefits GIS mapping has brought to Milwaukee city government in recent years, aging-department officials urged their Connecting Caring Communities' partners to use the technology to help plan for long term care systems improvements. In Broome County, GIS mapping is helping CPOA grantee Aging Futures to improve the lives of older adults in the mixed urban/rural county in upstate New York.
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Reaching Out: Houston and Maui Partnerships Tailor Efforts to Serve Elders in Key Cultural Groups
Partnerships in culturally diverse communities are seeing the benefits of targeted, creative outreach to better serve older adults. Stakeholders in places as disparate as Houston and Maui, for example, are tapping resources, developing strategies and implementing tactics to reach distinct groups, such as Houston’s growing Asian populations and rural Maui’s native Hawaiians.
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LGBT Older Adults Face ‘Sobering’ Challenges
Partnerships in San Francisco, Boston and Atlanta strive to meet needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender seniors
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Using Public Access TV to Get the Word Out
A community partnership in Hawaii is tapping an often-overlooked resource—public access television—to raise awareness of health care programs and services for older adults.
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Mission Meltaway
It all started with an article in the “Ladies’ Home Journal.” Lisa Schuhle was amazed to read that a community had lost 356,000 pounds in a major group weight-loss effort. Lisa took the story to her co-workers at Broome County’s Office for Aging, and in January 2000, Mission Meltaway (originally dubbed “Losing to Win”) was born.
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Partnership in New Hampshire Working with Business Community to Raise Needed Funds
The partnership for older adults in New Hampshire had crafted innovative fundraising projects based on a common thread: tapping longstanding relationships with businesspeople in their own towns.
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Information as the Fuel for Change in Boston
Brian Souza got the word last spring that a local philanthropy, Sailors’ Snug Harbor of Boston, was considering narrowing or even ending its grantmaking for older adult programs, in this city with a strong tradition of social services and philanthropy. A sputtering economy in recent years has reduced donations from many foundations and has forced several to reprioritize their giving.
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SF-GetCare: Web-based Information System Streamlines Care
SF-GetCare works to reduce the need for institutional placement among consumers by providing better information about San Francisco's array of home- and community-based services, and by facilitating better coordination among service providers.
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Highlights from One Campaign to Promote Awareness
In 2003, the Aging Futures Partnership in Broome County, N.Y., knew that the southern New York area offered a wealth of services to its growing population of older adults - and that people needing those services often had no idea they were available. How could the partnership make this claim so confidently? Partly because their knowledge was supported by data they'd collected in a recent evaluation. Having solid data helped open the door to a basket of foundation grants and in-kind donations that funded the partnership's Multimedia Awareness Campaign, launched in 2004.
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El Paso Explores Cultural Humility
Why does a community partnership with a name like SALSA (Seniors Accessing Long term care through Strategic Planning and Advocacy) invite Humberto Reynoso-Vallejo, national expert on cultural humility, to conduct a workshop in El Paso? Wouldn’t he simply be preaching to the choir? After all, a border city where 65 percent of the population is Hispanic/Latino understands the importance of culture in planning and delivering services for older people.
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© 2007 Community Partnerships for Older Adults