Resources for assessing age friendliness
Useful resources when assessing how age friendly your community is and which other programmes might work well with yours.
Resources for assessing current state
- Your local council: Check out what is available on the council website and/or in council publications. Local demographics can be a useful tool to demonstrate the need for an age friendly approach.
- Checklist of Essential Features of Age-friendly Cities [PDF, 223KB]: This checklist is a useful starting place for assessing the age-friendliness of your community.
- The mechanisms of subnational population growth and decline in New Zealand 1976-2013 [PDF, 1.27MB]: This guide, by Dr. Natalie Jackson, provides a summary of a comprehensive project that looked at population change across New Zealand towns, rural centres, and territorial authority areas over a 37 year period.
- Assessment templates from the:
- Survey Monkey: A free tool to create your own online survey.
- Building Great Communities - Consider an Age friendly Community Assessment [PDF, 1.11MB] from Grantmakers in Aging. Provides a matrix to help guide what type of assessment would be useful and which tool to use
- Comparison of place-based programmes with the World Health Organization’s Age-friendly Cities and Communities model [PDF, 949KB]
Resources for engaging with Māori
There are many other resources available to support your work with Māori:
- Te Arawhiti’s Guidelines for engagement with Māori [PDF, 87.9KB] help with effective and genuine engagement that supports relationships based on trust and confidence.
- Building Relationships for Effective Engagement with Māori from Te Puni Kōkiri (TPK). You can also contact your local TPK Regional Office for additional support.
- Kaumātuatanga – The Needs and Wellbeing of Older Māori [PDF, 7.45MB], a report commissioned by Te Pou Matakana that sought to understand what an ageing population means in the context of Whānau Ora approaches.
- Inspiring Communities is a New Zealand collaboration that supports community-led development. It has a number of useful resources including:
- Kia Tūtahi Relationship Accord Engagement Guide [PDF, 949KB] by The Department of Internal Affairs provides practical advice for engaging with Māori, Pacific peoples, ethnic communities, and disabled people.
Resources for engaging with Pacific communities
The Ministry for Pacific Peoples provides a range of resources to guide engagement with Pacific Peoples.
Resources – Ministry for Pacific Peoples
Resources for engaging with ethnic communities
The Ministry for Ethnic Communities offers a range of resources on their website, including the Ethnicity Matters guide to working with and responding to the needs of ethnic communities.
Resources – Ministry of Ethnic Communities
Resources for working with rural and remote communities
The Ministry for Primary Industries has developed ‘rural proofing’ guidance, to help policy makers consider the challenges faced by the rural sector.
Another practical guide has been developed in Canada which identifies indicators of age friendly rural/remote communities.
Age-Friendly Rural and Remote Communities: A Guide [PDF, 682KB]
Useful examples
- Age friendly Auckland survey – summary video: In June 2019, Auckland Council undertook extensive consultation across its diverse communities and used a simple summary online as a useful way to reach a large and diverse group.
- Auckland University of Technology is undertaking research to determine the factors that influence the age friendliness of rural communities.
- Age friendly Auckland – assessment findings [PDF, 521KB]
- Measuring the Age-friendliness of Cities [PDF, 7.33MB]: WHO monitoring framework.
- Napier City Council age friendliness assessment gathered information with help from volunteers using the OPERAT tool.
- Accessibility Photo Library: The New Zealand Human Rights Commission and Access Alliance teamed up to create a photo library which demonstrates positive and problematic examples of accessibility.
- Age-friendly Cities and Communities Information Kit for Local Government Councillors and Senior Management [PDF, 1.78MB]: This resource was developed by Council on the Ageing (COTA) Victoria and the Municipal Association of Victoria, Australia. It includes a mapping of existing local plans and strategies to the age friendly approach (page 18).
- Age Friendly City Survey [PDF, 892KB]: The Australian Capital Territory produced a short report on the results of their survey.
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