Defining local principles

Defining local AFC principles is basic to grassroots community development and is a task any dedicated group of individuals can complete. This section highlights approaches that communities have used. You can also find key resources and a list of relevant websites at the end of the section.

The AFC approach views the community and its leaders as change agents. Communities — including multiple stakeholders, both public and private — are comprised of active citizens with the potential to create change in their own domains and spheres of influence.

At early stages, you require local champions who can build momentum, progressing toward more structured discussions (e.g., focus groups). Ultimately, the goal is to build collaboration among local stakeholders (municipal council and staff; business leaders; local committee members; social planning councils; university/college faculty organizations) to develop guiding principles, a vision and goals for your AFC movement.

Objectives

• Create structure around a local initiative
• Determine which AFC dimensions are most relevant to your community

Key skills

• Communications: convey the benefits of the AFC movement
• Stakeholder relations: connect and obilize community members
• Facilitation: develop and promote focus groups
• Governance: organize and guide committees
• Basic numeric literacy: collect and present measurable information

Key tasks

• Form a steering committee
• Create guiding principles
• Build partnerships
• Create an age-friendly community profile
• Discuss priorities

By far the most challenging task is moving from ideas to implementation. While Section 7 of this guide discusses the topics of implementation and evaluation in more detail, start thinking about implementation early. The Principles and Building Blocks sections of the MAREP AFC website are of particular value for those developing an age-friendly implementation plan.

Form a Steering Committee

Build your team. Gather people from various backgrounds, professional disciplines and experiences that are willing to lead and create a vision for your AFC movement. Form a steering committee of committed people who are responsible for keeping your AFC process organized and on track. The University of Waterloo’s MAREP AFC website provides useful information and guidance on the AFC process, including tools for this step. In particular, the Getting Started — Set the Stage for Change tools advise you on how to create your steering committee, explore your team’s assets and determine whether your community is ready to move forward with its AFC initiative.

Define roles and responsibilities. As the team grows, members should have clear roles and responsibilities. A leadership model to consider is the constellation collaborative, where a central group acts in a stewardship role for the movement and a series of satellite groups work on particular issues or priorities.^{footnote 14[14]} This model requires someone to act as a champion and overall project leader to move initiatives forward and build capacity.

From the bottom up. Start and conduct your community’s AFC movement using a grassroots approach so that its vision and goals reflect the community’s values. The AdvantAge Initiative, a prominent community-building effort, offers helpful advice and numerous tools for this approach.

Build on existing initiatives. Municipal accessibility advisory committees (AACs) work with municipal councils to identify and eliminate barriers for people with disabilities. Under the Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2001, and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005^{footnote 15[15]},municipalities with 10,000 or more residents must establish local accessibility advisory committees. Approximately 150 municipalities have set up accessibility advisory committees throughout Ontario. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act mandates the committees to advise municipal councils on the identification and removal of barriers from Ontario communities. The majority of AAC members must be people with a disability.

Create Guiding Principles

Once you have formed your steering committee, you can 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 has suggestions for creating a community’s AFC vision. For examples of AFC vision statements from communities in Ontario, see the Hamilton Council on Aging, the Council on Aging of Ottawa and the City of Mississauga Older Adult Project websites.

Build Partnerships

Consider what partnerships you have fostered and what further support — human resources and financial — you may need for your AFC initiative. Engage with organizations in your community, businesses and non-profit organizations (e.g., the United Way), or other local foundations that could lend human resource capacity to your process.

If local government is leading your AFC initiative, or if it has strong municipal support, consider establishing an interdepartmental team. Establishing commitment across the municipal organization has strategic value, as the responsibility to implement various recommendations will fall within different departments. An interdepartmental team could include:

• Engineering
• Transportation
• Planning and Development
• Environment and Sustainability
• Economic Development
• Recreation and Cultural Services
• Building Services
• Housing Services
• Social Services
• Public Works
• Parks and Recreation
• Corporate Services

There may also be programs at the provincial and federal level that can support your efforts. More information on funding and forming community partnerships can be found in the Community Sectors and Community Stories sections of the MAREP AFC website, the local government section on the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing website and in Appendix VI.

Create an Age-Friendly Community Profile

An age-friendly profile is a snapshot of your community’s current age-friendly status. An accurate profile can prove invaluable when communicating the need for AFC planning or attempting to secure funding and partnerships. To start, consider including the following types of information in your profile:

1. A review of existing local policies that support the goals of your AFC movement.
2. A list and description of key local services that promote older adults’ quality of life.
3. A summary of existing age-friendly businesses in the community.
4. An overview of the current socio-demographic makeup and projections for future demographic conditions (for example, age, gender, income, ethnicity, health status).
5. A description of your AFC committee members’ (and potential partners’) key skills and strengths (for example, connections to local decision-makers; experience facilitating focus groups; proposal-writing skills).
6. A summary of how well older adults currently feel the social and physical environment promotes and/or constrains their quality of life.

To create your profile, you will have to access a range of information. You may be able to obtain some of this information directly from existing sources by contacting your local government and local organizations (especially for step 4 in the process of creating an age-friendly community profile). You may have to collect other information from existing policy documents (for example for step 1) or community stakeholders (steps 2, 3 and 6). To collect other information that does not already exist, consider engaging stakeholders through a combination of key informant interviews, focus groups and community meetings. Collecting data using different methods will give you a more complete picture of the age-friendly needs in your community. Some people use methods other than standard print to access information or communicate in ways other than the spoken word. We often refer to alternatives to standard print as ‘accessible formats’ and ways to help communication as ‘communication supports.’ To be accessible, organizations must be able to provide and to receive information and communications in an accessible manner. There are many ways to do this. Here are some examples: accessible electronic formats such as HTML and MS Word; braille; accessible audio formats; large print; text transcripts; or visual and audio information.

The Information and Communications Standard Guide: Making information Accessible to People with Disabilities available online at www.ontario.ca/AccessON, lists more formats. You can find a resource on developing accessible documents online at http://adod.idrc.ocad.ca.

Use existing data. Reviewing local policy and strategic documents and existing planning and development plans and strategies is an efficient and effective way to determine how you can draw on existing community projects to support your movement. Some examples to consider:

• Official Plan/Community Improvement/Secondary Plans
• Strategic Plan
• Growth Management Strategy
• Sustainability Plan
• Recreation and Culture Master Plan
• Accessibility Plan
• Transportation Master Plan
• Pedestrian and Cycling Plan
• Economic Development Strategy
• Asset Management Plan

Most municipal economic development departments will have a general community profile with demographic summaries and projections and many will have more specialized data about specific topics like household travel patterns, recreation preferences and satisfaction with municipal services. To determine what specialized data may exist in your community, consider contacting individuals within the key municipal divisions that this guide discussed earlier (Build Partnerships, p. 30). A social planning council or community-based research organization in your community is also a great resource for accessing data.

Many provincial, federal and non-government organizations also collect and house relevant data. Appendix I lists several key resources and describes how you can access the information you may need.

Interview local stakeholders. Conducting key informant interviews with committed local service providers and business owners can illustrate the positive effects of becoming age-friendly. Interviewing these stakeholders can also provide insights and lead to further partnerships with people who can influence local policy, mobilize staff and offer other valuable resources. Find out which AFC dimensions stakeholders think are most significant — their responses will help you prioritize your AFC.

Conduct focus groups. Focus groups are small group discussions led by a facilitator that explore the opinions and views of the participants. The World Health Organization (WHO) held focus groups in 33 cities/towns as part of its participatory research and published the Vancouver Protocol, a guide for conducting AFC focus groups. When discussing local issues, the WHO recommends first presenting some basic demographic, geographic, social and economic characteristics of your community (the information you collected from existing sources and interviews is a great start). Ideally, someone with facilitation experience should lead the focus groups, which should include a diverse range of stakeholders:

• Older adults
• Persons with disabilities
• Caregivers
• Service providers
• People of various ethnic backgrounds and income levels
• Local businesses

For examples of conducting focus groups, refer to the AdvantAge Initiative’s healthy neighbourhoods focus group or the Hamilton Council on Aging’s focus group report.

A key question to ask during your focus groups is which AFC dimensions are most important. Read out or distribute a copy of the AFC dimensions list (see Section 3) and generate a discussion or conduct a vote based on it. You will need this later when you prioritize your AFC goals.

Community meetings: Community meetings are another valuable way of collecting information. Although community meetings tend to produce less detailed information than focus groups, they typically reach a wider audience. They are also a great way to generate excitement around AFC and to connect stakeholders with similar interests and motivations.

Using technology such as Open Space, you can hold meetings for groups as large as a thousand. Ideally, a meeting would include diverse participants, from older people to practitioners in the private, public and non-profit sectors. Again, a key question to ask during your meeting is what AFC dimensions people think are most significant. We recommend that trained facilitators lead all types of community meetings.

Refer to the guides published by the Ontario Municipal Social Services Association:

• The Guide to Accessible Public Engagement provides step by step guidance on designing accessible public engagement processes.
• The Guide to Conducting Accessible Meetings helps meeting planners organize and run meetings of all sizes that are accessible to all participants.

Discuss Priorities

Using the information gained from your AFC vision, steering committee, community profile, focus groups and interviews, as well as tools on the MAREP website, your community can start to identify local AFC goals. At this point, it may be useful to see AFC goals that other communities have identified:

• City of Mississauga’s Older Adult Project website
• City of Brantford’s Master Aging Plan website
• Hamilton Council on Aging’s Hamilton, A City for All Ages report

Once your community has set its goals, prioritize them based on the AFC dimensions. Knowing these priorities will be critical when the time comes to create your custom needs assessment. Tallying the responses from your AFC focus groups and key informant interviews will help to prioritize AFC dimensions. The dimensions mentioned most frequently will be the most important.

If you need more responses from your community on what these priorities should be, consider conducting a Dotmocracy session. Dotmocracy is a transparent, equal-opportunity and participatory decision-making tool that simplifies the process of finding agreement among large groups of people. You can download a Dotmocracy handbook that provides an overview of the process, step-by-step instructions on facilitating a Dotmocracy session, resources and examples. A Dotmocracy session is similar to focus groups but also provides you with more visual and numerical data.

Central Ontario

Hamilton’s Age-friendly Community Experience

Collaborating with Partners to Develop a Strategy

What has Hamilton done?

The Hamilton Council on Aging (HCoA) was established in 2006 to improve the lives of Hamilton’s older adults through a collaborative network of individuals and organizations. The HCoA has worked to implement some of recommendations including increasing walkability and accessibility of retail centres as well as raising awareness of various services and financial entitlements. One such development was the implementation of workshops in 2012 to assist older adults in navigating the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR), Hamilton’s Public Transit System.

Hamilton demonstrates the benefits of collaborating with community partners to develop optimal strategies to create a more age-friendly community. Such partners include the United Way Burlington & Greater Hamilton, the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton, the Mayor’s Senior Advisory Committee, the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion and representatives from Public Health, the City of Hamilton’s Community Services, and academics, researchers and students. The City of Hamilton in partnership with the Collaborative is working to develop a seniors’ strategy for Hamilton.

How did Hamilton get there?

2006: Hamilton Council on Aging (HCoA) was established

2009: Established the Age-Friendly Advisory Committee with a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Conducted a focus group to engage the senior community.

2010: Released report “Hamilton: A City for All Ages” with 92 recommendations to enhance the social and built environments

2011: Companion report by the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton on “Profile of Vulnerable Seniors in Hamilton”

2012 – Present: Developing the Hamilton Senior’s Strategy

Implementation of workshops to help seniors understand transportation services

What are Hamilton’s next steps?

Next steps include focusing on increasing the age friendliness of Hamilton’s public transportation system and connecting older adults from diverse ethno-cultural communities to community services and opportunities for life enrichment.

To learn from other community experiences, visit http://healthy.uwaterloo.ca/~afc/community_stories.html