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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• community events
• implementation
• community practice
• macro practice
• public health
• social movements
• collaboration
• cross-sectoral
• ageism

Acknowledgments

We thank Annabess Ehrhardt, for her contributions to the Fair materials included in this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2023.2237098

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation The Grotta Fund at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Jersey.