Project releases blueprint for helping seniors
A communitywide project to make Columbus more friendly for senior citizens has released a strategic plan with dozens of recommendations, from checklists for businesses to longer crosswalk times to an inventory of available housing stock.
Nearly 1,000 residents weighed in over the past two years as organizers of the Age-Friendly Columbus initiative identified various strategies and age-friendly actions on eight fronts, including transportation and housing, outdoor spaces and buildings, employment, social participation and others.
“We learned that planning with, and not for, older citizens is key,” said Fran Ryan, 83, a former Columbus City Council member who
More than $1.6 million from the Ohio Department of Health will be spread across seven Franklin County agencies in an effort to reduce the county’s high rate of tobacco use.
The three-year grant was awarded this month to Franklin County Public Health. The goal is to
helps lead the project’s advisory council. “This work is important.”
Although Columbus is a comparatively young city, the area — like many across the country — is on track for a senior boom. Central Ohio’s 65-and-older population is expected to double in the next 35 years, driving new needs in health care, transportation, housing and recreation.
The city worked with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and others last year to create Age-Friendly Columbus and develop a three-year action plan for improvements. Now that the strategic plan is ready, the Ohio State University College of Social Work will act as administrator, said Katie White, who heads the Age-Friendly Columbus project.
She’s excited about the plan’s “Positive Aging Campaign,” an effort to promote education and awareness that uses documentary-style videos to tell powerful and positive stories about older central Ohioans.
Embracing aging and planning for it is critical, White said, “so that we’re not running against a crisis.”
German Village resident Karen Peters was featured in a video shown Tuesday as the Age-Friendly Columbus plan was revealed at the Gateway Film Center in the University District. “It was a lot of fun doing it,” said Peters, 74, who has been able to secure the modifications that allow her to remain in her two-story home despite a neuro-muscular condition that limits her mobility.
Supporters of the age-friendly effort want to make it easier for central Ohioans to age in place by addressing barriers that can wind up pushing seniors into retirement communities or nursing homes or leave them isolated in their houses and apartments. Nancy Male, grants administrator at the Franklin County Office on Aging, said she’s thrilled that the plan is so detailed.
“There are concrete steps,” Male said, noting the recommendation for a pilot “senior circulator” transportation program in Clintonville and Beechwold, and more focus on grandparents who are raising grandchildren because of the crisis of opioid addiction.
“A lot of people just think about social services, but the list goes on,” said Cindy Farson, director of the Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging. “There’s total awareness that needs to take place in all corners of a community.”
She praised the plan’s program through the Columbus Division of Fire, for example, that would tap a social worker to help with seniors who are repeat emergency-services users because of their chronic conditions.