Executive summary

Section 1: Background

An age-friendly community responds to both the opportunities and challenges of an aging population by creating physical and social environments that support independent and active living and enable older people to continue contributing to all aspects of community life.Although the concept of an age-friendly community is relatively new, it originated over fifty years ago in the field of environmental gerontology.^{footnote 2[2]}A key idea in this field is ‘person-environment fit’ (p-e fit).^{footnote 3[3]}This term means that a person’s ability to age well and independently comes from the relationship between his or her physical and mental capacity and the ‘press’ (or barriers) of his or her environment. For example, an older person living independently in his or her original home may find it increasingly difficult to climb stairs (a ‘press’) due to chronic health problems or a physical disability. However, rather than move, an older person may choose to adapt their home and reduce environmental impediments by installing a stairlift or finding other ways to remove barriers

Working toward communities that are age-friendly is a sound investment. Age-friendly communities are supportive physical and social environments that enable older people to live active, safe and meaningful lives and continue to contribute in all areas of community life. For private businesses, the benefits of marketing and providing goods and services to this growing market are clear. For the wider community, older adults are committed, long-term residents who contribute their time, energy and wealth of experience to the lives of their communities

Section 2: Using This Guide

Creating an age-friendly province takes all of us: residents, community groups, governments, the business community and the non-profit sector working together. A wealth of knowledge and resources from universities, the government and non-governmental organizations supports age-friendly community planning initiatives. We have designed this guide to discuss questions about Ontario communities and affected stakeholders undertaking or contemplating AFC initiatives. The Ontario Seniors’ Secretariat (OSS), the University of Waterloo, McMaster University and the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario have developed this guide to introduce age-friendly principles. It also provides a framework for selecting from a range of tools and community assessment measures to inform your age-friendly community action plan. This guide:

Explains the characteristics of an age-friendly community and how it can respond to the opportunities and challenges of Ontario’s aging population

Provides a ‘one-stop shop’ for a broad range of existing AFC resources

Recognizes that collecting information that reflects or captures the characteristics of your community as broadly as possible is critical to a successful AFC initiative

Offers those working on AFC initiatives a framework for making informed choices from among several flexible community assessment tools that can be tailored and adapted to local circumstances

Section 3: Age-Friendly Community Dimensions

AFC checklists and assessment tools, such as those developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), consider both the physical and social dimensions that contribute to independent and active aging.^{footnote 4[4]}

Researchers from the University of Waterloo and McMaster University and staff from the Ontario Seniors’ Secretariat present a series of assessment tools for Ontario stakeholders to consider and potentially adapt to their own AFC initiatives. The WHO’s eight dimensions that describe an age-friendly community are the basis for presenting the assessment tools in this guide

In brief, the WHO’s eight dimensions include:

Outdoor Spaces and Public Buildings: When people view a neighbourhood as safe and accessible it encourages outdoor activities or engagement with the community. Accessibility involves removing barriers that limit opportunities for people with disabilities, including older adults with age-related impairments, and allowing older adults to participate in social activities or to access important health and social services and businesses

Transportation: The condition and design of transportation-related infrastructure such as signage, traffic lights and sidewalks affects personal mobility. Access to reliable, affordable public transit becomes increasingly important when driving becomes stressful or challenging

Housing: For many older adults, aging in place is desirable. The availability of appropriate, affordable housing with a choice of styles and locations and that incorporates flexibility through adaptive features is essential for age-friendly communities

Social Participation: Interacting with family and friends is an important part of positive mental health and community awareness. Social participation involves the level of interaction that older adults have with other members of their community and the extent that the community itself makes this interaction possible

Respect and Social Inclusion: Community attitudes, such as a general feeling of respect and recognizing the role that older adults play in our society, are critical factors for establishing an age-friendly community. Age-friendly communities foster positive images of aging and intergenerational understanding to challenge negative attitudes

Civic Participation and Employment: Civic engagement includes older adults’ desire to be involved in aspects of community life that extend beyond their day-to-day activities, such as volunteering, becoming politically active, voting or working on committees. Economic security is important for many older adults, particularly those with low and fixed incomes. The ability of an older adult to remain employed or find new employment provides economic security, and it benefits employers who recognize the experience and commitment that older employees bring to the workplace

Communication and Information: Age-friendly communities make sure that information about community events or important services is both readily accessible and in formats that are appropriate for older adults. Moreover, an age-friendly community recognizes the diversity within the older adult population and promotes outreach initiatives to non-traditional families, ethnocultural minorities, newcomers and aboriginal communities

Community Support and Health Services: Good mental and physical health contributes to quality of life and age-friendliness. When evaluating age-friendliness, consider access to community-related services that support physical or mental well-being and the availability of health promotion or awareness services that promote and support healthy behaviours and life choices

Section 4: Defining Local Principles

The first steps in establishing an AFC process involve working with community stakeholders to define the terms of reference for your initiative. This may include developing guiding principles, a vision and goals for your community, roles and responsibilities, timelines and deliverables. Community stakeholders include older residents, business owners, municipal staff, council members, service providers, volunteers, members of postsecondary institutions and others who share a commitment to make their community better for all.

The key steps in the ‘Defining Local Principles’ stage include:

Form a Steering Committee: Gather people from various backgrounds, professions, academic disciplines and experience who are willing to lead and create a vision for your AFC initiative. The University of Waterloo’s Kenneth G. Murray Alzheimer Research and Education Program (MAREP) AFC website provides useful information and guidance on the AFC process, including tools for this step

Create Guiding Principles: Once you have formed your steering committee, schedule a planning session to establish your community’s AFC vision and values. Again, the MAREP resources are a good starting point and the AdvantAge Initiative online tool kit suggests ways to create a community’s AFC vision

Build Partnerships: Consider the partnerships that your group currently has and what further support — for example, other groups or organizations, financial commitments — you may need for your AFC initiative. Engage with organizations within your community, businesses or non-profit organizations, such as the United Way or other organizations that could lend support to your process. Consider reaching out to potential funders like the Ontario Trillium Foundation and other non-profit and private foundations

Gather Information: You can assess the age-friendliness of your community by holding a combination of small group discussions among steering committee members interviewing volunteers from local seniors’ organizations, distributing questionnaires and tapping into existing information gathered for other purposes — for example, statistical data from your community’s municipal official plan review, or program and user surveys that your municipality’s parks and recreation staff may have circulated

Discuss Priorities: Begin to identify AFC goals. Prioritize these goals before you develop a needs assessment

Section 5: Custom Needs Assessment

A needs assessment identifies the gaps in and opportunities for improving a community’s age-friendliness. Conducting a needs assessment involves identifying the information you want to collect and identifying the tools that you will use to collect the information (such as surveys, focus groups or questionnaires). You can establish your approach after identifying your community’s p-e fit, which reflects the eight dimensions of an age-friendly community articulated by the World Health Organization (WHO)

The recommended process for building your community’s needs assessment is:

Review Data Collection Tools: Seventeen age-friendly assessment tools have been reviewed and compiled within this guide to provide a comprehensive resource for users that does not require independent, time-consuming and potentially costly research. The tools contain questions that focus on the eight dimensions of an age-friendly community identified by the WHO. Some focus on the physical environment (for example, housing, outdoor spaces and public buildings, transportation). Others discuss the social side of an age-friendly community (for example, social participation, respect and social inclusion). Focus on tools that reflect the priorities identified in the Defining Local Principles stage

Create a Draft List of Questions: Refer to the University of Waterloo website where you will find the 17 AFC assessment tools and their associated questions in a downloadable database. Choose the questions that are relevant to your community

Create Person-Environment Pairs: To make sure that your needs assessment questions will capture information about your community’s person-environment fit (p-e fit), balance questions about your community’s environment with questions about how people feel about their environment

Finalize the Needs Assessment: Before taking your needs assessment into the community to collect information, pretest the assessment to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Sit down with a small sample of those you would like feedback from (for example, older adults, caregivers, service providers) and ask them for suggestions to improve the needs assessment

Section 6: Developing an Action Plan

Use the information you collected through the needs assessment to develop your action plan or as the road map that will guide your community’s age-friendly planning. Action planning involves:

• Analyzing the information collected through your needs assessment
• Identifying strategies to become more age-friendly
• Turning these strategies into an action plan document that will guide your community’s age-friendly policies and programs
• Evaluating the action plan as it is implemented

You can often identify strategies and action items in an unstructured manner (for example, through ‘brainstorming’ sessions among committee members). We recommend, however, that you build your open discussion and strategizing around specific questions (as adapted from John M. Bryson’ s Applying Private-Sector Strategic Planning in the Public Sector ^{footnote 5[5]}and Michael Quinn Patton’s ‘Utilization-Focused Evaluation’ [U-FE] framework)^{footnote 6[6]}to discuss the concerns that your municipality’s councillors and staff could have

• What are the alternatives we might pursue to address this issue?
• What are the barriers to these alternatives?
• What approaches exist (if any) to overcome those barriers?
• What are the priority actions for the next two to three years and three to five years, and what resources are currently at hand to implement the strategies (such as municipal staff or programs that are responsible for senior related services and programs)?
• What specific actions do you need to take in the short term and longer term to implement the strategies, and who is responsible for each step?

Section 7: Implementation and Evaluation

Once your action plan has been adopted and is being implemented, evaluate it both during implementation and afterwards. Evaluation will help you determine how you can improve the action plan and whether or not its strategies and action items are meeting their intended outcomes

This section presents two approaches to evaluation:

A formative evaluation places less emphasis on outcome and more on determining how to improve an ongoing action plan. It can identify specific factors that have made an initiative successful, but it mainly collects continuous feedback from stakeholders to revise the action plan, if necessary

A summative evaluation is essentially a test to judge the worth of the action plan at the end of the program activities. The focus is on the outcome and on judging the merit and worth of an initiative to assist primary users in determining whether to terminate, expand or spread the initiative’s use.