To assess the age-friendliness of your community in terms of the eight key features for an age-friendly community, and to address gaps you may find, it would be helpful to have a plan.

In February 2008, the Age-friendly Communities Implementation Team developed Age-friendly Communities - How Age-friendly is Your Community? A Guide to Local Governments To Getting Started. This is a practical step-by-step guide for communities to work with their local governments in using the Age-friendly Community Guides to assess the age-friendliness of their community, identify solutions and implement actions.

Here are some steps to help get you started to developing an age-friendly community.

1. Define your community on a map. This could be a neighbourhood, a reserve, a village, a town, an entire city or a collection of small communities that have expressed an interest in a joint initiative. Also identify initiatives already underway to avoid duplicating efforts.
   
   
2. Depending on your community obtain copies of either Global Age-friendly Cities: A Guide or Age-friendly Rural and Remote Communities: A Guide. You can also contact the Age-friendly Communities Implementation Team to order a copy of the guides.
   
   
3. Create an "Age-friendly Community Project Team" with members that reflect the diversity of people in your community and older persons. The team should include older persons - particularly those who are known leaders and advocates - business persons, city planners, Aboriginal members (both on and off reserve), health care providers and health authority staff, researchers, council members and community organizations. The support and input of local government officials is essential.
   
   
4. Pass a motion or resolution. If you are a local government, formalize your Community’s commitment to becoming more age-friendly by a Council Resolution. For other organizations, pass a motion at a Board of Directors’ meeting.
   
   
5. Appoint an Age-friendly Communities Co-ordinator to keep the process on track. This person could be an employee of the local government or band council or another community agency.
   
   
6. Get community buy-in by making presentations to significant neighbourhood groups (for example, town hall meetings, older persons’ groups, Band Councils, Chamber of Commerce). Request that they endorse and support your objectives.
   
   
7. Establish a reasonable deadline for completing an assessment of the age-friendliness of your community. Make these dates flexible as you may find you need twice as much time as you originally thought.
   
   
8. Conduct an inventory of what your community has already achieved, the features that you are most proud of, and then list the areas that need improvement. Collect this information by means of surveys, focus groups, photographs and/or community consultations. It can form your baseline for comparisons from year to year. The age-friendly Guides are specifically designed to assist you in conducting your inventory.
   
   
9. Prioritize the most important changes needed and present your findings and recommendations to people who are in the position to implement them. Wrap up and congratulate yourselves!
   
   

Funding

To help you along the process there are several funding sources that provide community grants that can assist you in either developing a dialogue in your community or for implementing some of your findings. Details of these grants can be found in the funding section on the Links page.