Lifelong Living Communities – creating vibrant neighborhoods for aging
Lifelong Living Communities is the quintessence of CICOA’s mission to build communities for seniors and people of any age with a disability so they can live as independent, as healthy, and as engaged in life as possible.
Our Lifelong Living Communities initiative evolved from the AdvantAge Initiative, a planning model developed by the Center for Home Care Policy and Research, Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
This model depicts four “domains” to assess the elder-friendliness of a community and guide efforts to prepare for our aging population. The four domains are:
As the area agency for aging in central Indiana, CICOA is taking the lead in the work. In 2002 we sponsored a survey of seniors aged 65 and over in Marion county with the purpose of gathering data to use in directing our efforts to make central Indiana the most elder-friendly area in the country. The survey results underwent a thorough analysis by teams of local community leaders who then produced a list of key recommendations. (to see recommendations click here)
The AdvantAge Initiative (AI) and the survey gave us a great start to building a world-class, elder friendly community by providing specific goals and objectives, and by generating public interest. As the next step CICOA recast AI to be known as the Lifelong Living Communities initiative – creating create vibrant neighborhoods for aging.
