Learn from
Good Practices

Domain: Social participation

The “Elder Home” initiative is a home-based service model that provides older people with opportunities to socialise and improve their skills and capabilities through a series of activities held in the Elder Home every day. These include poetry and book reading, arts and craft courses, as well as choir, theatre, and dance performances. Other educational programmes and sporting events are also held at the Elder Home.

Three Elder Home branches were established in lower-class, middle-income and high-income neighbourhoods respectively to cater for different needs of older people. Some participants reported that they have become more productive, more sociable and happier.

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Domain: Civic participation and employment

Senior citizen volunteers received awards of appreciation and recognition of their voluntary contributions and positive impacts they have made to the work of a wide variety of organisations and groups in Belfast. There are five different award categories, which include Participation Award, Arts and Culture Award, Older Volunteer of the Year Award, Team or Group Award, and Intergenerational Team Award.

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Domain: Respect and Social Inclusion

The Age-friendly Business initiative is an educational outreach campaign that provides practical tips to help businesses become more age-friendly and attract older customers (e.g. providing information on how businesses can provide quality service for older adults with difficulty of mobility, vision and hearing impairments and dementia). Participating businesses receive a window sticker with the slogan “We are friendly”. They are also included in an Age-friendly Business Guide developed in 2015 and the web-based Age-friendly Places Map.

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Domain: Transportation

Older people in Akita are entitled to ride a bus at an affordable price of 100 yen or are provided with free alternative transportation. Feedback on the programme has been positive. In particular, the simplicity in paying bus fares and more convenient access to social activities and healthcare services are highly valued by elderly people.

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The “2020 Aging Society Master Plan” was a ten-year plan of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to embrace the vision of making Seoul an age-friendly city by 2020. To foster a “friendly society for ageing”, the Master Plan focused on six main areas: healthy ageing, active living, productive senior citizens, an integrated society, convenient surroundings, and a redesigning infrastructure. The Age-friendliness Working Plan was established to address the main areas by implementing a number of tasks, such as exploring diverse new jobs for seniors, and introducing a scheme with college students and seniors co-living in a house, where students provided the seniors with basic day-to-day support in exchange for low rent.

The city has been running the Seoul Elderly Policy Monitoring Group since 2012 in order to provide more opportunities for older people to get involved in making policy decisions. Seniors’ awareness of the city’s senior policies is monitored and evaluated through survey assessment.

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As part of the national programme, the city of Qiqihar aims to build a city where older people can live happily through better medical care, contribution to society and engagement in life-long learning.

Qiqihar has made efforts on age-friendly work. To arouse public awareness on age-friendly concepts, the annual event of “Seniors Month” was initiated to encourage various sectors of the community, including enterprises, organisations and individuals, to provide appropriate assistance and services to older people. An annual award has been introduced with the aim of recognising the role models of the service industry for their respect towards older people.

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Manchester was the first UK city to join the WHO Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities in 2010. Building on the Valuing Older People programme and the ten-year Manchester Ageing Strategy, the Age-friendly Manchester Development Plan centres around four themes: Age-friendly Neighbourhoods, Knowledge and Innovation, Age-friendly Services, and Involvement and Communication.

Adopting a citizenship-based approach, the Plan involves citizens as active members who lead the changes and includes a number of initiatives. For example, the Age-friendly Manchester Neighbourhood coordination group was set up as a platform for local groups and services to learn about ageing-related research, policy and practice. The older people were trained as community researchers to identify important issues to enhance age-friendliness.

Besides, the membership in the Manchester Older People’s Forum has been expanded so that members had more opportunities to influence service redesign across the city through setting meeting agendas and developing core priorities. The Age-friendly Manchester Older People’s Charter has also been launched to illustrate what is required for an age-friendly city and to call for pledges from individuals and organisations to help improve the age-friendliness of Manchester.

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The Louth Age-friendly County Initiative aims to address the WHO’s eight domains of an age-friendly city and implement age-friendly projects to address older people’s needs across the county of Louth. On physical environment, Louth has extended the timing of traffic lights for older people and improved housing support services such as provision of meals and laundry facilities. In terms of social services, there have been increased opportunities of volunteer services for older people, and provision of training programmes for older people to learn how to use the Internet.

A range of county-wide projects and initiatives were also implemented, including:

• The Intergenerational Participatory Arts Project involving retirement groups and school students working together to create artworks
• The Louth Old People’s Forum (which is joined by older people, advocacy groups, service providers and community stakeholders) that organises regular meetings to discuss the needs of older people

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