County finishes first draft of new Age-Friendly plan

Back in 2015, Tompkins County and the city of Ithaca joined the AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities, an initiative of the World Health Organization that seeks to help prepare municipalities for a rapidly aging population. For this, the Tompkins County Office for the Aging partnered with the Ithaca College Gerontology Institute, Cornell University, local human service organizations and county municipalities, who all worked together on the Age-Friendly initiative.

The result of that partnership was the Age Friendly Ithaca and Tompkins County Action Plan published in late 2016 (available at tinyurl.com/y8qg6hnm), which detailed guidelines to make the county more accommodating to people of all ages. Now that the five-year timetable of the original plan has passed, the Age-Friendly team has been tasked with issuing a new, updated plan, for which it recently completed the first draft.

Teri Reinemann, consultant for the 2016 Age-Friendly plan and the new draft plan, and Lisa Monroe, director of the County Office for the Aging, spoke with Tompkins Weekly about the new draft plan and the effects implementation could have on county residents.

As Monroe explained, it was Lisa Holmes, now county administrator, who led the Office for the Aging in its efforts to make the county an Age-Friendly Community.

“It was really started to further the efforts that were already happening in the community, just to engage people more in planning and preparing for the aging population,” she said. “At that time, there [were] 16,000 people over 60, and we knew that that was going to increase in the next two decades. Baby boomers, the oldest ones will be 77 next year. … We wanted to use this

Age-Friendly process to demonstrate our commitment to promoting these policies, Age-Friendly programs and recognizing how important they are for community health.”

These included strategies to address social determinants of health and promote enabling environments that would benefit people of all ages, Monroe said.

After the 2016 plan was published, the writers created a timetable to track their and the community’s progress in fulfilling the established goals (visit tinyurl.com/y9g3oy2v).

Among the goals marked under “significant progress or outcome achieved” include engaging with student groups to conduct an assessment of small and large local businesses’ age friendliness, offering an education session on accessibility to the Tompkins County Council of Governments and meeting with municipal leaders to inform them about the housing needs of older adults.

While writing the new plan began last November, it was back in 2017 that the process really began.

In 2017, New York became the first Age-Friendly State in the U.S., and just one year later, the governor issued Executive Order 190 to “incorporate a Health and Age Across All Policies strategy into state agency activities leading to a public-private partnership between the New York State Office for the Aging, the Department of Health, the Department of State, and the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York (HFWCNY),” according to the draft plan.

In 2019, the Tompkins County Office for Aging was awarded a grant from the HFWCNY to create an Age Friendly Center for Excellence, which was tasked to work with a wide variety of stakeholders to create a plan forward.

“We actually had our first meeting where everybody got together in Albany on March 5, 2020,” Reinemann said.

The intercommunication that Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed for greatly influenced the direction of the new plan. Reinemann said in drafting the plan, she and others consulted greatly with other community leaders like at the county Planning and Health departments and the new Center for Excellence. In addition, student researchers at Cornell greatly helped to provide the information needed to craft effective strategies.

“The idea is that this Age-Friendly stuff isn’t just the Office for the Aging,” Reinemann said. “They wanted us to work with our planning department and work with the health departments and incorporate the work that they were doing into the plan. So, you can see that it’s very clear when you look at the different goals and tasks where they came from. So, there’ll be things in there that specifically came from the county Planning Department and specifically came from the Health Department.”

While 2016’s plan pushed for making the county more accessible to people of all ages, that emphasis became more prominent in the new draft plan.

“What’s good for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old will help everybody else in between, whereas for the most part, planning is really about able-bodied 20- to 30-year-olds,” Reinemann said. “The idea is that we need to design and think about everybody — older people and younger people — when we’re doing this kind of work. So, it’s just a different way of thinking, but it’s also not something that happens right away.”

As Monroe explained, this approach serves to benefit every resident.

“What is good for 8 and 80 also will lighten that load of those people in the middle that are probably the ones taking care of the 8-year-old and possibly taking care of the one that’s 80,” she said. “So, it benefits all people. And there’s so many pieces to it, but it’s a concept that can help everybody age well.”

The pandemic, unsurprisingly, caused major disruption in the drafting process and had a large impact on the research that went into creating the new plan. Every interview with community leaders involved at least some discussion around the pandemic, including the effects it had on their daily lives, according to the draft plan.

“The interruption of typical life, however, revealed the strongest parts of each community,” the draft plan reads. “Communities that were able to overcome troubling impacts of the pandemic did so because they had strong foundations of volunteerism, collaboration and established networks. … Many communities already reliant on volunteerism found that their age-friendly practices helped make resilient communities in the face of the pandemic.”

In this light, several of the suggestions in the draft plan take the pandemic into account.

Some of the recommendations in the new plan include building and maintaining a task force of social service agencies, local communities and others; building on the successes that emerged from the county’s COVID-19 response efforts, including advancements in the delivery of goods and service, finance and information sharing; recognizing the importance of volunteerism and community engagement, including expanding internet access; and expanding service access across multiple spectrums like grocery delivery and prescription drugs.

Further complicating the drafting process during the pandemic has been staff turnover, Monroe and Reinemann said.

“There’s no overarching position that keeps the focus in this Age-Friendly concept,” Monroe said. “It’s all kind of on the Steering Committee. The founding members — Teri, myself and Lynn Gitlow and Esther Greenhouse — are the only ones that are still involved in this process because people turn over. So, you’re continuously educating, and we’re trying to reengage people in understanding what this is.”

Monroe said that it was the hard work of Reinemann, Esther Greenhouse, Mildred Warner and area college students that kept the process moving forward as smoothly as it did.

“For all this work to have come out of that, I’m still impressed by it,” she said. “But it couldn’t have been done without everybody that helped us. So, that was the biggest challenge, I think, and ‘coming out of the pandemic,’ we felt comfortable enough, probably just this fall, to start to even think about the plan.”

With pandemic challenges calming down, Reinemann and Monroe are optimistic that a new plan will be finalized within the next couple of weeks, when it will then be sent to AARP and the World Health Organization for approval. That approval allows the county to retain its designation as an Age-Friendly Community.

Like the first plan, the new plan will be on a five-year cycle, so the next several years will once again be filled with efforts to implement the goals and a new timetable to guide the process.

While the draft plan is not yet publicly available, Reinemann said it will be posted to the Age Friendly Center for Excellence website (tompkinscountyny.gov/cofa/center-excellence) once finalized.

Thinking Ahead appears in the fourth edition each month of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com.