Some projects followed a blueprint. Others blazed a trail.
The New Jersey Age-Friendly Grants Program officially concluded this summer, but much of the community, regional and statewide work it funded will continue in some fashion and serve as models for other age-friendly leaders to learn from or replicate.
A newly launched page on Age-Friendly New Jersey’s website details the diverse range of statewide and regional projects and community and county initiatives sparked by the 15-month-long grant program of the New Jersey Department of Human Services.
“This new web page is intended to showcase the great work that was accomplished during the grant period,” said Rebecca Martin, associate program manager of the EJ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, which offered training and technical support to grantees. “It will also be a source of concrete ideas and replicable models for community, government and nonprofit leaders in New Jersey who are interested in launching their own age-friendly programs and projects.”
In addition to featuring narratives about the individual grant projects, the web page will soon contain a link to two helpful community planning tools created by Rutgers University. These tools utilize American Community Survey data to support local and regional leaders in better understanding their community needs and assets.
One of those – the Age Friendly New Jersey Mapping Tool – lists regional assets that support age-friendly work. The other, called the Aging & Disability Snapshot, is a dashboard displaying municipal and county-level data about older adults and people with disabilities.
“This grant period may be over, but the age-friendly work of many of the individual grantees will continue and we hope that by chronicling those efforts, other leaders across the state can see the value of applying age-friendly strategies and approaches as they plan for population aging,” said Martin, who served as the Age-Friendly Grants Program project manager.
In all, 10 project grants were awarded to organizations and local governments across the state to address some of the key recommendations of the New Jersey Age-Friendly Blueprint.
Promoting transportation alternatives was the goal of three project grants. Each took a different approach – one offered older residents in two Passaic County towns education and training on local transit options; another subsidized a new senior rides program in four southern Jersey counties; and a third enhanced the affordability and ease of use of a statewide senior ride service.
An Ocean County nonprofit used grant funds to reduce the wait list for older adults in need of crucial home repairs. Several other grantees addressed the need for social connections, each in different ways, such as a Morris County nonprofit’s hosting of new culturally competent social programs, a northern New Jersey organization’s campaign to recruit older adults to serve as mentors to at-risk youth, and two municipalities, Paramus and Bound Brook, worked to enhance their senior center programs.
One project led by New Jersey Advocates for Aging Well established New Jersey’s first ever Age-Friendly Employer program.
The other types of grants offered through the program were intended to seed or sustain age-friendly community planning efforts.
More than two dozen of those grants went to municipalities and counties across the state, some to advance the work of age-friendly community initiatives underway, such as efforts in Fair Lawn, Leonia, Princeton and Bergen and Ocean counties.
Other communities and counties newer to age-friendly work used the funds to conduct detailed surveys of their older residents to learn more about their aging-in-place challenges and desires and develop age-friendly action plans. In eight of those localities -Bernards, Cape May County, Edison, Frenchtown, Lodi, Montgomery, Sussex County and Verona – the grant-funded projects led local leaders to join the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities.
Throughout the grant period, the Bloustein School, led by Martin and consultant Shannon Lyons, provided quarterly individual and group technical assistance sessions and held biweekly office hours to support grantees in their work.
Martin and Lyons also organized 12 webinar trainings, 8 of which were targeted to grantee needs and 4 that addressed core focus areas identified through the NJ Age-Friendly Blueprint. Grantees were also provided with resources to help them complete their goals, and all were invited to attend a June 17 half-day-long Grants Program convening at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft.
Another academic institute, the Rutgers School of Social Work Hub for Aging Collaboration, was designated to serve as the evaluators of the grants program. Its staff conducted surveys and focus groups with the grantees to learn about the activities and outcomes of their grant-funded work. The initial report from the evaluation is available at https://go.rutgers.edu/nj-agefriendlygrants-baseline. A final evaluation report is forthcoming in the fall of 2026.
“We are continuing to learn so much about the ways in which investments from the state can make a tremendous difference on age-friendly capacity-building at the local level,” said Emily Greenfield, Professor of Social Work and evaluation lead and director of the Hub. “Through the evaluation, we are learning how these grants have translated aspirational values about aging in New Jersey into concrete activities that strengthen ‘the engine’ of individuals, organizations, and networks to improve communities and systems for longer and healthier lives throughout the Garden State.”