January 2025

Mark Your Calendars for the Healthy Aging Research California Virtual Summit

Co-authored by Dick Myers.

During fall 2023, Pasadena Village joined a national dialogue on Healthy Aging Research sponsored by a partnership of the Village to Village Network, the Rutgers University Hub for Aging Collaboration and the RAND Corporation. This dialogue is part of a multi-component project, Engaging Villages in Healthy Aging Research.

The research project on how Villages promote healthy aging is in its early stages. RAND conducted a series of focus groups with nearly 50 Village members, officers, and professionals from across the United States, including five from our Village. The aim of the focus groups was to understand the meaning of healthy aging to Village participants, their perspectives on how Villages support healthy aging, as well as conditions that influence Village engagement. And now a new report, “Developing Research Capacity for Healthy Aging with Villages,” presents findings from the focus groups.

A second component of the Healthy Aging Research Project is the California Virtual Summit, to be held on Thursday, June 27 from 10 am to 11:30 am PDT. This is one of six regional virtual summits taking place in June and July. At this 90-minute gathering via Zoom, participants will connect with other Village members, leaders and allies from across California through mini-presentations and facilitated discussions on Villages and healthy aging research.

The summit aims to discuss key insights from the above-referenced report and will explore questions facing Villages as they seek to demonstrate their outcomes, cultivate partnerships with researchers, and grow the Village Movement in the coming years. The summit is open to all Villages and the broader public and will be led by the project team and the Villages Healthy Aging Research Ambassadors group.

To register for the Virtual Summit, click here; for more information, see the flyer about Healthy Aging Research here.

If you are a current member of Pasadena Village, you are already participating in and contributing to this research through representatives Ed Mervine, Dick Myers, and Marvin Dainoff. If you are not currently a Villager, you can contribute to this research by simply attending the summit and learning more about it. In either case, we urge you to attend this virtual summit.