Age-Friendly Columbus/Franklin County, Ohio

Lessons Learned (and Advice for Others)

Katie White offers up the following recommendations:

Be Inclusive

“Make sure that older adults and people with disabilities are by your side as equal partners and contributors. Include them in every single aspect of this work — from designing your surveys to participating in focus groups to putting together policies to attending city council meetings.

“Some of the same older adults that were with us in the very beginning are now our best ambassadors and are out in the community. When we have an event they're out there saying, ‘This is worth your time. This is important. Your voice is really being heard and your voice really matters.’"

Know When to Step Back

"We are really good at pulling together the partners for funding and the data to say, ‘We need to pilot a program now and here's what it needs to look like.’ And then once it gets going, we work together to make it sustainable.

"Not every project needs to go on forever. But if it needs to be sustainable, we work on that and then we sort of fade into the background. It doesn't really make sense for us as an age-friendly community to be running ongoing programs, whereas it does make sense for us to identify data-provided evidence to pull in the funding, evaluate it and then step out and let the real experts run the programs."

Reach Out Beyond the 'Aging World'

"In the beginning, you have to be willing to take all the meetings, attend advocacy events, serve on committees and be present for as much as possible. This is needed in order to start carving out the age-friendly space in conversations outside of the typical aging world.

"It really makes a difference when, if possible, you have a paid, dedicated staff member for this work. When we started, we had all the momentum and support behind us in aging, which is what we needed to launch it. And then we put the Age-Friendly Columbus program into our regional planning organization. By having an organization outside of aging, we were able to launch that aging lens across transportation, housing, planning and all of those types of conversations."

Join the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities

"Joining age-friendly has hands down been the shift in our community toward thinking and talking about aging in places that it had never occurred before. Just having your community thinking and talking about aging is a huge success.

"We have communities from all over that email our team members asking, 'How did you do this and why should we enter the network?' Aside from all of the incredible materials and research that's available through AARP, it just is important to be part of the official network so we can continue to push this forward and have collective impact.

"In Ohio, we started something called the Coalition of Age-Friendly Communities of Ohio (or CAFCO). We meet on a quarterly basis, we mentor and share information. That cross-state collaboration is well supported by the AARP network, which provides the information, the background, but also the backbone and connections to other communities.

"We all need to be listening and working together and learning from each other. If we learned something in Columbus and Franklin County, and it's working, we want to share that out as quickly as we can so others might be able to utilize it as well. And when other communities are having success, we need to learn from them, too."

Ask Questions — and Listen to the Answers

"We had a whole year or two when we were concentrating really heavily on transportation and mobility, particularly with Safe Routes to Age in Place.

"We learned through the survey and our focus groups that not many older people were taking the bus. We held more focus groups with immigrants and refugees in seven different languages: What would help increase the number of people who take our local bus?

"We came up with a robust list of strategies, including to figure out an easier way to update the bus stops and for older adults to get their discounted bus passes. The bus system was already rolling out an easier way to buy bus passes but we could not figure out who and how to get funding for the bus stop improvements.

"Finally, after multiple submissions, we received a grant that will start in 2022. So in 2022 and 2023, we'll be using our data to know where dense populations of older adults live.  We'll actually go with older adults to look at the bus stops they use and ask, 'What improvements do you want?' We’ll use the funding from the grant and make the improvements through a partnership with our local transit authority.

"It took three years, multiple grant submissions and tons of work and time to show and prove why this is important. We finally are getting it done. Along the way we built these great partnerships, like with our transit authority. There's frustration, there are meetings that are uncomfortable and awkward or you're accidentally making somebody mad by trying to push forward your aging agenda. But when you are based in community engagement and don’t give up, eventually it all falls into place. We finally are getting it done, after all these years, and it’s because of persistence and partnerships. The whole network is still sort of in its infancy and we need to make sure that it keeps going so we can all learn from each other about experiences like this."

Team Up

"Once the funding came together in late 2017, Age-Friendly Columbus was ready to begin its implementation phase. At the same time, Franklin County’s commissioners passed legislation to expand age-friendly countywide.

"The first shared task involved deciding where to house the implementation phase. The Ohio State University College of Social Work was the natural choice, due to its dedication to excellence in research, service, community well-being, and social and economic justice for vulnerable populations.

"The team chose as its office a location near a recreation center just outside of downtown Columbus. It’s a bustling spot that allowed us to lead grassroots advocacy efforts. Partnering with a university, if at all possible, is a really smart option to explore. Research and student partners have been invaluable to our growth and success.

"Once we moved into the university, we were able to grow our relationships within and beyond the College of Social Work. We took time to find faculty members whose research and approaches align with the age-friendly approach, such as staff, faculty and students in the School of Public Health. As long as the program goals and approach align, you can really enhance one another’s work.

"Organizing and running focus groups for gathering community input are another benefit of teaming up with an academic institution. I knew how to do focus groups, but a university has a lot more techniques and analysis, and that made the findings more valid and scientific."