Age-Friendly Commitment
We have to stop saying that communities are designated as Age-Friendly.
It’s not a designation. It’s a commitment — a commitment to continuous progress. It requires ongoing listening to maintain an ever-sharpened, hyper-local lens focused on the needs and opportunities of aging. It’s recursive design — when you think you’re done, you test what you made and you go back to the beginning, make sure it still works, and work to make it better.
Describing Age-Friendly communities as a designation makes it sound like a hat. You buy your Age-Friendly hat, you put it on, and TA-DA!
All done. All better. Time to focus on other things.
It’s not a hat though, it’s a garden. If we don’t tend it then it dies. Like a garden, it requires investment up front and patience until we can hold the tangible benefits of our work in our hands.
Here’s a question for you. Do you want to wear a 100 year old hat? I mean, maybe — but unless that hat has also been well tended to, there’s a good chance it’s falling apart. When we commit to Age-Friendly design thinking in communities, we build and sustain systems that meet people where they’re at every single day, at every age.
Age-Friendly communities remain fresh and new. They are alive and constantly evolving, so let’s please feed and water them.