PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Around a dozen people gathered in the Senior Center at the Sargent Family Community Center on Wednesday, Feb. 28, to hear officials from AARP Maine speak about potential steps that Aroostook County communities can take to become “age friendly.”
Patricia Oh, age-friendly community team lead for AARP Maine, hosted three informational sessions in Fort Kent, Presque Isle and Houlton on Feb. 28 and March 1 in partnership with the Aroostook Agency on Aging.
In Presque Isle, she explained that age-friendly communities are towns and cities that are committed to helping people of all ages live safely in their communities and “encourage older people to take an active role in changes that will make their community a better place for people to live, work, play and do business.”
The AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities has 214 communities that are age friendly, with 47 of those communities in Maine, though currently none in Aroostook County. With 90 percent of Maine residents having a desire to age in their own communities and 21 percent of Presque Isle’s population aged 55 to 69, Oh said that it has become especially important to break down the physical, social and emotional barriers that can keep seniors from becoming active members of their communities.
“In 2006, the World Health Organization asked 22 countries about what their communities needed most for senior citizens. All of them said that they needed better transportation, physical access to buildings and outside spaces, social participation, affordable housing and employment,” Oh said.
When a community becomes age friendly, they’re recognized on AARP Maine’s online member list; have access to technical support and assistance with volunteer recruitment, media and promotional items; and are eligible for small planning and implementation grants. The first steps involve gathering a team of people who wish to seek age-friendly certification and receiving support and approval from the community’s municipal officials.
The remaining steps involve creating an action plan, implementing changes that aim at greater senior participation in community activities and regularly evaluating the plan and making improvements as needed. Oh discussed both small and major changes that towns across southern and Down East Maine have done as part of their age-friendly community efforts.
“In Bethel, they didn’t have a public transportation system and the age-friendly committee realized that they needed a social ride program for seniors. And because of this group of volunteers that got together they were able to provide 175 rides for seniors to access the town and it didn’t cost them anything,” Oh said.
Age-friendly initiatives also can involve many communities located in the same region. The Bethel Area Age-Friendly Committee has five towns that are members, four of which joined after Bethel became the first to commit to the initiative.
But each community can make different changes based on the specific needs of the seniors who live there. Some communities have made infrastructure changes while others have introduced social opportunities to connect seniors with each other and younger generations such as “Neighbor Day,” community walking programs and fitness courses.
There is no cost to join AARP Maine’s Age-Friendly network and the initiative requires little investment on a community’s municipal officials, though mini-grants are available through AARP Maine for those who wish to make large investments such as accessible picnic benches or other adaptive equipment.
Throughout the presentation, audience members, who included senior citizens and representatives from local agencies, asked many questions and expressed interest in the potential of age-friendly initiatives for Aroostook County. But the surprise of the afternoon came after the session when Ken Murchison, zoning administrator for the City of Caribou Planning Board, presented Oh with the first age-friendly community application from Aroostook County.
“Bill Flagg, from Cary Medical Center, introduced this initiative to the board and recommended that we think about the idea of age-friendly communities,” Murchison said. “In the city, we already provide elderly housing and I think collectively as a community we can do better in terms of becoming even more senior-friendly.”
Flagg noted that in addition to the wellness center and senior health program at Cary Medical Center, he would like to see Caribou take advantage of possible initiatives for senior transportation and neighborhood programs to increase access to social interactions and community events for those with limited mobility.
“I know of one community downstate that has done a volunteer ride program called ‘Snow Angels’ where high school students shovel steps and driveways for seniors for no charge,” Flagg said. “We want to put together a committee that includes local senior citizens so that we can learn from them how we can become age friendly.”
Those who wish to learn more about AARP’s Network of Age-Friendly Communities or download an application can visit www.aarp.org/agefriendly or contact Oh at paoh@aarp.org. Joy Barresi Saucier, executive director for the Aroostook Agency on Aging, said she hopes attendees leave the presentation with greater awareness of how communities can come together to help seniors live and thrive in the County.
“Our mission as an organization is to help seniors age in place and stay independent for as long as possible,” Saucier said. “I think creating age-friendly communities is one of the ways we can do that. Even with minimal resources, there’s so much we can do when we use our energies to make our communities better places for everyone.”
