Age-friendly BC - Part 2 - Process

Transcript: Age-friendly BC -- Part 2 -- How BC Communities are Becoming Age-friendly

Colin Milner
Chief Executive Office
International Council on Active Aging

What can communities that have worked on becoming age-friendly tell us about how they did it? Collaboration with different groups is important, as is community sponsorship from both politicians and staff, as well as access to innovative and long-term funding.

Steve Meikle
Manager of Community Services
District of Saanich

Well, in order to build an age-friendly community I think it's important to involve seniors right from the get go to ensure that what we're doing, the plans we're making, the major changes we're making, are hitting the mark.

Jill Zacharias
Social Develop Coordinator
City of Revelstoke

In Revelstoke here we did an age-friendly plan for Revelstoke and area which included really extensive community consultation. The older people were kind of feeling left behind, they were feeling a little left out a bit and just the community consultation process alone was very, very empowering for our senior population. It told them that they had a voice that people were listening to.

Steve Meikle
Manager of Community Services
District of Saanich

One of the things we find with age-friendly cities, or these kinds of initiatives, is it's rather short-lived. It often just has a life span that, you know, there's a build up, and then the report comes out and then it trickles away, and we've taken the approach of saying "we heard in the first place the needs of seniors were important. Let's look at ways of incorporating that into our everyday business". So as we do our annual planning each department will have a look at their major priorities and they're taking the feedback and the responses we've heard from seniors and incorporating that into their budget planning, their action planning for the next year, and their strategic planning for the longer term.
Andre Boel
Community Planner
District of Sechelt

It's very important to incorporate design guidelines policy and accessibility vision into an official community plan for example, or in design guidelines for development applications, because that's the way you incrementally get to where you want to be as a community. In our official community plan we condensed the accessibility vision to one of the main goals. The guidelines that can be handed out right now it gives me a sense that this community together we accomplished something.
Ken Klassen
Director of Finance
Village of Lumby

How you weather the political change of changing mayors and councils is that you have the policies you are trying to do in your official community plan so the administration can carry those policies for the next 15, 20 years as the case may be.

Jill Zacharias
Social Develop Coordinator
City of Revelstoke

One of the key things initially was that we were able to be successful in our grant applications. Through those you develop a relationship with your funding bodies. We've developed a relationship with the Seniors' Healthy Living Secretariat which I think has been very positive. But I think one of the key pieces is that we've really strengthened and been able to form new partnerships within the community itself in order to specifically act on recommendations and do project development for the benefit of the seniors in our community.

Ken Klassen
Director of Finance
Village of Lumby

To be a part of the change and transformation of the community has been rewarding. Because you can see where some of the projects you were involved in are good and are accepted and the people are appreciating and they want to be a part of it and I'm glad that I was able to be administratively involved to enable that to happen for our community.