The Center for Aging & Adult Research & Educational Services

“For these adults to live in the community, they need to have a community that is habitable,” said Linda Kendall, Cares program coordinator and clinical assistant professor in the SSW. “This means building communities with accessible and integrated — not segregated — housing and cross-generational, true community support for people across the lifespan.”

To this end, each pilot program grantee — the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, Hope North Carolina, the Land of Sky Regional Council, and the Piedmont Triad Regional Development Council — will receive up to $150,000 annually from Cares to pilot programs designed to increase housing affordability and accessibility, reduce transportation barriers, increase the availability and retention of direct support workers, and help individuals build natural support networks.

“We are asking our awardees to build communities’ capacity in unique ways,” said Annamae Giles, the initiative’s project coordinator and clinical assistant professor in the SSW. “This award gives them the funding and time to be bold and creative.”

While Cares selected grantees through a rigorous application process, its work with these grantees and the communities they serve hinges on a non-hierarchical collective impact model. In this model, all stakeholders — community members, program staff, and policymakers — collectively establish a common understanding of the problem and an agenda for solving it. Stakeholders also define measures of success and regularly reaffirm these consensus points throughout the project.

Because collective impact is a cornerstone of Cares’ efforts, individuals and families maintain personal agency in initiatives created to assist them. “Instead of coming in with a preformed intervention, we want to honor and learn from the lived experience, knowledge, and expertise of the communities we work with,” said Gary Nelson, DSW, the founding director of Cares. “We’re encouraging and supporting our grantees to do the same.”

In addition to offering technical assistance and support in the design and implementation of each initiative to ensure that they achieve stated goals, Cares established the Collective Impact Learning Network to periodically draw grantees back together to help them apply principles of collective impact in their own projects.

Considering Cares’ successes, Money Follows the Person has committed to expanding its contract to promote Cares’ outreach and engagement efforts to families and communities seeking greater inclusion for older adults and adults with disabilities, many of whom still face bias and limited options to community life.

Building such inclusive communities is a universal good, Giles added. “When a community works for older adults and adults with disabilities, it works for everyone.”