CPOA -

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.

Getting Started

Shared Vision

Information Gathering

Priorities & Planning

Measuring Impact

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

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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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