A new year is a time to take stock of how far you’ve come and what’s ahead.
Our Age-Friendly North Jersey alliance greets 2025 with a newly designed website, new community members, expanded partnerships at the regional and state level and new and encouraging signs of sustainable age-friendly progress.
Much of what we are looking forward to in 2025 – state grant dollars funding age-friendly work in communities, the launch of an effort to create a multi-sector plan on aging and a host of new community and county leaders joining the movement – is the result of a long list of accomplishments in 2024. So much so, it’s worth some reflection.
Strengthening of Our Regional Alliance
New Year’s 2024 started with the announcement of a significant change in the leadership of Age-Friendly North Jersey through the establishment of a new working relationship with New Jersey Advocates for Aging Well.
The enhanced partnership has yielded a new professionally designed website, agefriendlynj.org, which highlights the success of this now 9-year-old movement in northern New Jersey and compiles the resources our network uses to help educate about and advocate for the changes needed to make New Jersey more livable for everyone.
To further our alliance’s commitment to foster new innovations and collaborations, 2024 featured virtual meetings and webinars on a variety of topics, including how to fuse age-friendly work with senior center programming, a virtual presentation from leaders from Generations from Garfield about Age-Friendly Police Partnerships and a discussion of Reframing Aging strategies.
Alliance members also had many fruitful in-person gatherings in 2024, the first in January to network in the New Year and hear a preview of a Rutgers School of Social Work research report on the accomplishments and sustainability of the community movements in North Jersey. Leaders also met in person in June for a presentation on age-friendly progress in Essex County and to tour a brand-new community center in South Orange that now serves as home base for SOMA Two Towns for All Ages. Our members met again in Teaneck in October to hear the promising story of the age-friendly partnerships that paved the way for a new affordable senior housing building and community center spearheaded by Age-Friendly Teaneck.
Significant Progress on the State Level
Our local and regional leaders have built strong ties with the state-government leaders working on statewide age-friendly goals, and 2024 saw some of the biggest strides to date in those collaborations.
Amid all the Older Americans Month 2024 celebrations in May came the exciting release of the NJ Age-Friendly Blueprint, a 38-page report that suggests avenues for making New Jersey’s communities better places for residents as they age.
That news was followed in August with the announcement of a Request for Proposals for a $5 million grant program to help more Garden State towns engage in age-friendly community-building work and to foster age-friendly projects that address goals in the new state blueprint. Funding announcements from the Department of Human Services are still pending.
In December, another important stride toward an age-friendly future was made when New Jersey was selected to participate in the Multisector Plan for Aging Learning Collaborative. This national learning community, led by the Center for Health Care Strategies, is helping states advance multi-year, cross-sector planning efforts to ensure that the future needs of older adults, people with disabilities, and their family caregivers are met.
Increased Traction at the Local Level
Finding local strategies to address the global challenge of population aging is the core mission of the age-friendly movement, and New Jersey logged many achievements in communities and counties in 2024.
New Jersey had five new entries into the AARP Network of States and Communities in 2024, including Camden County and Glen Rock in May, Hillsborough in July, Leonia in September and Middlesex County in October. In addition, five veteran communities in the network had their status renewed after submitting progress reports in 2024, including Englewood, Garfield, Livingston, Ridgewood and Teaneck. In all, 22 communities, five counties and the state of New Jersey itself are members of the AARP network.
Many veteran communities made significant strides within their own communities and in mentoring new age-friendly initiatives and modeling successes.
Fair Lawn’s innovative Youth Volunteer Corps program was selected by Generations United as a Program of Merit. The national award praised the program for engaging high school students in helping older adults while also bonding and learning from them.
SOMA Two Towns for All Ages continued its creative approaches to engaging older adults in meaningful pursuits by forming FORT (Figuring Out Retirement Together). The new club meets at South Orange’s renovated Baird Community Center, which will be the new home of SOMA’s other volunteer-focused programs, such as its successful Repair Café.
In October, Age-Friendly Teaneck celebrated a concrete sign of community progress with the opening of a new community center that will serve as a hub of new age-friendly programming in that town of 40,000 residents.
Many local leaders in our alliance spent time last year spreading the age-friendly message to other local and regional leaders.
Leaders of Generations for Garfield have been assisting five Bergen County towns in enhancing their public health through the forming of new age-friendly coalitions in their communities.
Another key ambassador was Janet Sharma, coordinator of Age-Friendly Englewood. In addition to serving on the Age-Friendly NJ Advisory Council, which provided the New Jersey Department of Human Services with crucial feedback on the new Statewide Age-Friendly Blueprint, Janet made crucial presentations throughout the region, including one on climate resilience at New Jersey’s annual Planning and Redevelopment Conference.
Sharma also coordinates the Age-Friendly Bergen Roundtable, a bimonthly gathering of local providers and community leaders that featured many informative presentations in 2024.
Two leaders from our alliance – Lisa Bontemps of Westwood for All Ages and Elizabeth Davis of Age-Friendly Teaneck – were also named in May to the newly created Bergen County Age-Friendly Task Force.
Advancements in Age-Friendly Research and Knowledge-Building
Our alliance is fortunate to have a host of statewide partners devoted to studying and showcasing successful age-friendly models.
In March, The Hub for Aging Collaboration at the Rutgers University School of Social Work hosted the inaugural InnovAGING NJ 2024 Summit, which featured presentations on the grant-making initiatives that fueled the growth of our alliance and on offshoot age-friendly initiatives such as Teaneck’s Exploring Careers in Aging high school internship. The Hub followed that event with a cross-national virtual summit in December that examined Equity in Community-Centered Models for Aging,, continuing to position our work in New Jersey as a contributor to the global Age-Friendly Movement
In May, the New Jersey Advocates for Aging Well annual conference featured a panel on the links between age-friendly work and public health systems. NJAAW’s monthly newsletter includes a section each month highlighting the efforts and achievements of Age-Friendly North Jersey.
We look forward to chronicling further age-friendly advancements in 2025 on our new website.
Here’s to a Happy and Age-Friendly New Year!