Statewide Age-Friendly Virtual Fair as a Tactic for Social Change Across the Aging Ecosystem.

Prior research has demonstrated ways in which community events help to establish age-friendly community initiatives and strengthen their impact. We extend these insights by discussing how the design and implementation of a statewide event - the New Jersey Age-Friendly Virtual Fair - exemplifies this practice theory and extends its applicability beyond local community development toward broader state-level age-friendly ecosystems. We describe how events that are deliberately multi-organizational, multi-sectoral, and multi-level can help to further propel the Age-Friendly Movement toward systems change for aging in community.

Responding to Local Needs by Mobilizing Community Assets: Age-Friendly Community Initiatives During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background And Objectives: Age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs) strive to make localities better for long and healthy lives by fostering improvements across social, physical, and service environments. Despite the heightened need for community supports during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, very little research has addressed the work of AFCIs in the context of this crisis. We aimed to develop theory on how AFCI core teams have contributed to community responses during the pandemic, as well as what contexts have influenced the initiatives' ability to contribute.

Giving, Receiving, and Doing Together: Interorganizational Interactions in Age-Friendly Community Initiatives.

Multi-sectoral collaboration is widely considered essential for age-friendly community change; however, there has been little empirical research to describe the ways in which organizations interact as part of age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs). We conducted a qualitative descriptive study using data from multiple waves of semi-structured interviews with core teams of eight grant-funded AFCIs in the north-eastern U.S.

Theories of Community Collaboration to Advance Age-Friendly Community Change.

The age-friendly communities movement has grown rapidly in global prominence over the past 2 decades. However, theories to guide multisectoral action toward age-friendly community change have been slower to develop. We demonstrate the value of drawing on theories of community collaboration to inform age-friendly community efforts across engagement, planning, implementation, and measurement.

The Cumulative Effect of Prior Maltreatment on Emotional and Physical Health of Children in Informal Kinship Care.

Objective: Millions of children cared for by their grandparents or other kin without a biological parent present are not part of the foster care system. Maltreatment may have precipitated out-of-home care arrangements, but most children in informal kinship care are not being tracked or receiving services. Importantly, the extent of previous child welfare involvement and its association with well-being among this population are not well known.