Step 1.1 – Align with others
Find out who else is doing age friendly related work in your community and look at how you could link your work with theirs.
Coordinate with local groups
Creating an age friendly community generally requires coordination and cooperation between local community groups and organisations, such as:
- local councils
- district health boards
- iwi and hapū
- government agencies
- non-government organisations.
Review any strategies and plans these groups have online, and get in touch with them to explore how you could work together to improve the wellbeing of the community.
Look to other programmes
Combining your approach with other programmes can create more benefit for your community.
For example, dementia friendly approaches usually fit well with age friendly work.
Alzheimers New Zealand has developed these tools:
- Dementia Friendly Communities Toolkit [PDF, 1.42 MB]
- Dementia Friendly Recognition Programme for businesses and organisations wishing to become more dementia friendly
- Dementia Friends programme is a short online awareness and education module where you can start learning about dementia and how you can help.
“We now have a really increased understanding of why it’s important to work together, others have been doing work but in isolation, we are starting to see collaborative projects coming out of the plan that otherwise might not have happened.”
Nick Chester, Hamilton City Council
Next: Set up a steering group »