Outreach to older residents is challenging, even in a community with a vibrant, active and well-resourced senior center.
Leaders of Age-Friendly Mahwah decided to take that challenge head-on by bringing programming and resource education outside the doors of the senior center and into parks and outdoor gathering spaces in this sprawling 26-square-mile Bergen County suburb.
A “sandwich generation” health fair, a dessert party, a series of “pop-up” events encouraging older residents to fill out an age-friendly assessment survey and a weeklong summer camp for seniors held in different parks and nature areas. These were among the strategic events that the Mahwah Human Services Department organized as part of a yearlong “Outreach Resource Program” undertaken with the help of its age-friendly community planning grant.
“Harmonizing was the goal, and we were trying to appeal to the older residents who don’t typically come to the senior center,” said Alicia Duroy, Mahwah’s Director of Human Services. “Another goal was to raise the awareness of some of our regular senior center attendees to the many other amenities that this community has to offer, particularly our beautiful parks.”
Camp Kikayak, held June 15-19, 2026, featured a walking trail scavenger hunt, archery classes, a bocce ball clinic, mindfulness exercises, presentations on volunteer opportunities and a host of intergenerational activities held in collaboration with the local high school. The camp’s name was derived from a word that translates into “respectful elder” in the language of the Ramapough Lenape tribe native to Mahwah, Duroy said.
Each day brought 30 to 40 participants, some regular attendees of the borough’s senior center and others who were enticed by the outdoor activities and presentations from a local horse farm and environmental organization seeking more older adult volunteers.
About 23 percent of Mahwah’s nearly 26,000 residents are over the age of 65, according to U.S. Census American Community Survey estimates from 2025.
Mahwah is Bergen County’s northernmost and geographically largest community. The community doesn’t have a centralized downtown and many of its neighborhoods lack sidewalks, but it is rich in open spaces. Located near both the Ramapo Mountains and Ramapo River, Mahwah is home to many local and county parks, nature preserves and outdoor recreation complexes, including Campgaw Mountain Reservation, Darlington County Park and Ramapo Valley County Reservation.
Because it can “take 20 minutes to get from one side of Mahwah to the other,” many older residents – particularly newer ones who downsized into the town’s many condo and townhome developments – aren’t fully engaged in community life, Duroy said.
That is why Mahwah decided to prioritize increased outreach and generation-bridging activities when designing its age-friendly community initiative. A survey was pushed out digitally on the town’s website and in the daily senior center schedule emails that Duroy sends to more than 1,000 registered seniors. Paper copies were also available at all outreach events and at the senior center, which typically has 125 to 150 visitors each day.
Residents were asked for views on a host of issues, from health care access to social connections to transportation.
“How to get around when you don’t drive is always going to be an issue in a community this size, but we are fortunate to have four vehicles that operate from 8 to 4 Monday through Friday and will drive people outside of our borders to as far as 15 miles away,” said Duroy, who also helps coordinates senior transportation in the town. “I think what surprised me from many of the surveys we received was how many people are not aware of a lot of the services available in the region, including transportation.”
That finding has prompted her department to begin work on a Mahwah-focused senior resource directory. The borough also intends to follow up its outreach and survey activities with the development of an age-friendly action plan.