Age-Friendly New York

Well, I am thus far impressed with what I see of New York City's age-friendly initiative,
being led by the non-profit New York Academy of Medicine. The website even uses the words "from the perspective of seniors" - this could turn out well!





The Age-friendly New York City website states that the campaign is being steered by "a committee of policymakers, service providers, community leaders, and seniors [who were] convened to advise the Academy on the implementation of a comprehensive assessment as well as the analysis and dissemination of results." Ok, so far so good.

The page goes on to discuss the various activities that contributed to the initial research for this initiative, including "self assessment by city agencies", and "expert roundtables [on issues of] Business, Housing Development, Civic Engagement, Transportation, Tenant Rights, Social Services, and Health". It doesn't sound like older adults were part of these roundtables; maybe that is because they were targeted in other components of the study such as Community Forums and Seniors Focus Groups. Personally, I am troubled by what sounds like a separation between the consulting experts and the individual's with personal experience and expertise with the issues being discussed.

Since I work in research, I am empathetic to the fact that there is always a reason why things go the way they do. Sometimes you are operating according to a mandate from higher up. Sometimes you just have really limited time and smaller groups of like-minded individuals are perhaps the efficient way to move forward. While these things may be true, I can't help but worry that this is contributing to a dubious form of knowledge production where the "elite", so-to-speak, are meeting in one room to discuss an issue, while the community members (those actually "living the issue") are meeting somewhere else... I imagine that the City of New York has the very best of intentions, but that isn't an excuse to avoid an integrative approach where diverse groups collaborate directly on early stage development of large expressively stated community-focused initiatives. If this kind of engagement strategy is not feasible, for whatever reason, it would still be good to know what happened. I have no doubt that clear communication would assure parties that truly collaborative approaches have not been forgotten, even if a modified approach has been taken for whatever reason.

Maybe you are not so worried about community engagement; I just came out of a seminar on this topic and am feeling particularly passionate about the importance of meaningful public participation in policy and planning.

In spite of my concerns, there is an impressive report of the findings of New York's Age-Friendly City study which restores my confidence in New York's age-friendly initiative. From the looks of the early pages, this report is everything that city's age-friendly website leaves to be desired. The research is detailed and relevant, there is meaningful inclusion of older adult contributions, the photography is lovely. While New York's age-friendly city website seemed to understate the importance of older adult contributions to the research, this report makes very clear that this work was undertaken with commitment to the voices of New York's older adults. The methodology section (p. 6) provides comprehensive information about the research that took place and its various components. A Limitations section (p. 9) also provides an earnest description of excluded populations of older adults and mention of areas for future research. There is also reference made to a Technical Report which apparently includes a more detailed rendering of the project's quantitative findings.

There are several other additional documents which further build the credibility of this project. These include:

• Awesome data maps which you can take a look at here;
• Literature reviews on several of the core themes of urban aging;
• Private Sector Response document highlighting critical findings and the ways in which private sector plans to take action and work toward solutions, and;  
• A page with links to international documents such as the original World Health Organization report and pieces of interest.