Welcome to Age Friendly Communities

Here you will find tools and resources to help guide your community, organization, or business in building an age-friendly community. Using the tools on our website has three unique benefits!

  • It uses a set of value-based principles to guide your decision-making. These values are integrated into three building blocks to help you think more systematically about becoming age-friendly.
  • It places strong importance on community engagement, active participation, and collaboration among individuals and agencies.
  • It consolidates information from a variety of resources, such as the World Health Organization Age-Friendly Cities Checklist, the Age-Friendly Rural and Remote Guide, and other resources about healthy, walkable, diverse, and livable communities.

What is an age-friendly community?

  • Welcoming
  • Inclusive
  • Supportive
  • Accessible
  • Where everyone has community pride
  • Where everyone has choices and those choices are respected
  • Where everyone can contribute
  • Celebrates diversity
  • Recognizes everyone’s unique skills and abilities
  • Encourages citizen participation

Becoming an age-friendly community is a continuous process and requires a lot of teamwork and critical analysis of supports and services.

Tips for navigating our website

  • This website is divided into sections to help you work through the steps of building an age-friendly community.
  • The first three sections of this website: this page, Introduction, and Getting started, provide you with a background on age-friendly communities and strategies on how to start your age-friendly initiative.
  • The next three sections: Guiding principles, Building blocks, and Community sectors, are what make up an age-friendly community and these sections will help guide you through the process.
  • The last section offers some additional resources.
  • As you open the Guiding principles, Building blocks, and Community sectors pages, there will be more pages listed that you can work through in order to guide you through building an age-friendly community.
  • On many pages you will find videos that will help introduce the topics discussed on the page. Make sure you have your volume turned up to listen to the videos. You can click CC to see the video captions.
  • We have also included additional information on building dementia-friendly communities. Read these pages to find out how to support this unique population.
  • Along the way, we will be posting tips like these ones, about how to best use the Age-Friendly Communities website.
  • Click Age-Friendly Community: Blueprint to continue learning how to build an age-friendly community.