CPOA - Real Life Impact

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Real Life Impact

Impact can be measured in numbers, bar graphs and statistics. But one of the most memorable ways to determine how partnerships are working in the communities is through stories. Read about real life impact, successes and challenges, of the partnerships' work to improve the lives of older adults in their communities.

Stories

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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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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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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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

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.