How Philanthropy Is Pushing for an Age-Friendly New Jersey

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Dateline: Hoboken, New Jersey. 

On a clear day, you can see Manhattan. 

Actually, even in the driving rain, Manhattan is visible from Hoboken. New Jersey is tied to New York in myriad ways, including physical proximity, a shared commuter population, and residents in both states heading to Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for their coffee and schmears. 

Now, the Garden State is looking to the Empire State for guidance on something else — creating age-friendly communities. “New York is one of our close ‘mentors’ on this,” said Julia Stoumbos, program director of the aging in place program at the Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation, one of New Jersey’s leading funders in the age-friendly community movement.

As with other aging-related initiatives we’ve covered, such as those spurred by the Metta Fund in San Francisco, New Jersey philanthropies are taking an active, almost activist role in creating age-friendly communities, using funding to spur research, collaboration and concrete change. The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation, for example, has given a little more than $3.5 million toward the age-friendly community effort in New Jersey over the past seven years.

Cities and states get on board

So what is an age-friendly community? One in which restaurants offer happy hour menus that double as early bird dinner specials and SilverSneakers classes outnumber CrossFit gyms? 

Sort of. An age-friendly city, or age-friendly community, is a place where older adults can remain safe, healthy and engaged throughout their lifespan, due in part to structural adaptations designed to accommodate old age. 

Back in 2007, the World Health Organization identified eight ways for cities and communities to improve their age inclusiveness, including adapting outdoor spaces and buildings to accommodate wheelchairs and other mobility devices, and creating better pathways for social participation. In 2010, the WHO created a global network of places focused on becoming great places to grow old. 

AARP also has joined the effort, forming a similar network of communities. Joining either WHO’s or AARP’s network is not a certificate of age friendliness. It’s not like the aging version of being Fairtrade. Rather, joining means a place has committed to making change in at least one of the eight domains identified by WHO. 

New York City was the first city in the U.S. to join WHO’s global network, back in 2010. New York State then became the first state in the nation enrolled in both the WHO’s global network and the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States. 

Its neighbor to the west, though? Lagging behind. 

Where are you, New Jersey, when it comes to aging? 

In 2021, New Jersey became the ninth state to be accepted into the AARP’s network. The state now also has an age-friendly advisory council. But it hasn’t implemented much of anything yet. Nor does it have a master plan for aging in place like that other leader in healthy aging policy, California. 

But New Jersey needs to do something. About 17% of the Garden State’s nearly 9.3 million residents are currently over the age of 65, according to Census data. By 2030, the over-60 set in New Jersey is estimated to rise to 2.5 million, a quarter of the state’s population, according to research cited by Taub. The state, like so much of the nation, is not set up to accommodate this shift.

In 2016, the Taub Foundation partnered with the Grotta Fund for Older Adults, an advisory council fund at the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest NJ, on a half-day conference on aging. They brought in experts from around the nation, inviting them to share their experience and findings with local leaders — and hopefully inspire action.

“It worked!” Stoumbos said. “It was tied to a grant opportunity, so nonprofits came, as well as academics, social service providers and social workers. A lot of people were interested in it.” 

At the conference, the Taub Foundation announced an RFP for communities interested in starting a planning process. “It was to test the waters, to find out from their community members if they’d like to get involved in an age-friendly community initiative,” Stoumbos said. 

Of the applicants, the foundation funded five community efforts in Northern New Jersey’s Bergen County, an area ranging from the hilly, bucolic bedroom community of Hillsdale to the racially diverse communities of Garfield and Teaneck, home to many recent immigrants. Each grantee received a short-term planning grant of $25,000 to $35,000 to fund a needs assessment survey about aging. Meanwhile, the Grotta Fund was doing the same thing in other Northern New Jersey counties. 

Taub later went on to invite the existing grantees to apply for a much bigger grant — $75,000 a year for five years — to hire a coordinator to spearhead the work, to be present at health fairs and other public events, and to reach out to other nonprofits to collaborate and brainstorm. All five grantees took the offer.

“The more we talked to other people, the more we realized that it was probably going to take three to five years. You don’t want to walk away too soon or lose the momentum,” Stoumbos said. “It seems really important for someone to wake up every day and think about this and have this be their job — to bring stakeholders together, to put it into a plan, to get all the departments together to think about this. It’s like building a movement, really. It takes much longer than you might think.”

Age friendliness takes time

Lindsay Goldman, CEO of Grantmakers in Aging, joined the affinity group after eight years spent working on Age-Friendly New York City and Age-Friendly New York State. Goldman said that aging work takes time, in part because not everyone is accustomed to seeing aging as their domain. Like the master plan for the aging movement at the state level, the age-friendly communities framework is partly about expanding people’s vision. “For the most part, only the social services people were talking about aging. It’s really about applying that aging lens to transportation, housing and areas of life that people working in healthcare and social services do not control,” Goldman said. 

As part of the age-friendly movement in New Jersey, the Taub Foundation and Grotta Fund have also been funding the Rutgers School of Social Work. Emily Greenfield, the director of the school’s recently launched Hub for Aging Collaboration, was a collaborator in the 2016 conference and is an ongoing thought partner with Taub. She said the slow pace of transformation in aging makes it a key area for philanthropic investment. 

“Public-sector bodies need a catalyst from the outside,” Greenfield said. “Private philanthropy is totally essential to create social change in this area because they can take a certain amount of risk and try new things and have a mindset of learning, intentionally and systematically. Having strong proof of successes through private philanthropically seeded work is very helpful in capturing the imagination and gaining the attention of people in other sectors.” 

Greenfield credits the Taub Foundation and the Grotta Fund with spurring change in a state that had been lagging. “Our state was not a great source of innovation in aging in community. It was pretty much a desert in age-friendly communities before. Thank goodness we have private philanthropies who understand the need and have the potential and resources to invest.”

Age-friendly New Jersey, take two

Now, as those first five-year grants come to an end, the Taub Foundation has opened another RFP for members of the first cohort interested in doing specific leadership development, mentoring other towns, or working on more regional-level collaborations. In addition, Taub is funding a land-use research organization, New Jersey Future, along with the Regional Plan Association, which is promoting things like ADUs and other housing and transportation options that better accommodate the needs and preferences of older adults. 

Taub has also funded something called the Alliance of Age-Friendly Communities, a networking group housed at Rutgers University. Members meet monthly to hear from speakers and share insights. The alliance now includes leaders from about 16 age-friendly community initiatives in Bergen, Essex, Morris, Passaic and Union counties. 

Now, funders in New Jersey are looking into how philanthropy can shift its involvement without stopping the momentum. “We’re asking, ‘What should be the role of philanthropy with this?’ Should the role of an age-friendly coordinator live in county government, state or municipal government, or a combination of nonprofits, rather than a philanthropy?” Stoumbos said.

Another goal of these New Jersey funders is to help the state’s age-friendly communities create a groundswell of support for a statewide plan. “We feel like a natural evolution of age-friendly community work is to then have a multisector plan. They are very similar,” Stoumbos said. “It’s been a very exciting journey.”