Cross-Agency Collaboration to Address Rural Aging: The Role of County Government

ABSTRACT

Age-friendly community planning and design mainly focus on urban aging and may be less applicable in rural communities. We collaborated with the Tompkins County Age-Friendly Center for Excellence in New York State to assess strategies for rural aging. This commentary argues that density and mixed-use development, as age-friendly development strategies, leave rural communities underserved. County governments, by supporting cross-agency collaboration and encouraging civic engagement, can link the age-friendly domains regarding built environment, service delivery, and community together to help address age-friendly issues and support rural aging.

KEYWORDS:

• Age-friendly
• built environment
• civic engagement
• cross-agency collaboration
• local government
• services

Key points

• A primary focus on the built environment is not enough to build an age-friendly community.

• Local governments must pay attention to service provision and civic engagement.

• Cross-agency collaboration helps fill the service gap in rural communities.

• Local government leadership and civic engagement are key to collaborative networks.

• Collaborative partnerships promote age-friendly communities and address rural aging.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the members of the Tompkins County Age Friendly Center for Excellence task force, especially Teri Reinemann, Lisa Monroe and Esther Greenhouse for their leadership. We would also like to thank all the community planners, agency representatives and town planning board members who participated in this research. We especially acknowledge the work of the student interns - Lin Khant Oo, Grace McCartney, Robyn Wardell, Jeremy Xu, Jake Scherer, Katrina Cassell and Savana Lim – who helped conduct some of the field research on which this article is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Rural hamlets are small rural settlements with a concentration of housing, but no local government. Villages are small rural settlements with an official local government.

2. In Tompkins County, urban communities include the City of Ithaca, Town of Ithaca, and Village of Cayuga Heights. Rural communities include all the other towns, and the Village of Trumansburg in Town of Ulysses, the Village of Groton in Town of Groton, and the Village of Freeville in Town of Dryden.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), grant number 2019-68006-29674 and by a grant from Engaged Cornell.