By MADISON KORMAN
PHOTO CREDIT Adobe Stock photo
College Park is working toward achieving a designation from the AARP that indicates the city offers a good quality of life for older adults.
Membership in the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities means elected leaders have worked with residents and local advocates to make their community a friendly place to live for aging residents, according to Jen Holz, the Maryland AARP representative for the Age-Friendly Community designation.
“This is a tried-and-true program that has worked in other jurisdictions,” College Park City Councilmember Maria Mackie (District 4) said. Hyattsville became the first Maryland city to become a member of the network in 2017, and Greenbelt, like College Park, is working toward membership.
In its fiscal year 2025 budget, the College Park City Council approved funds for a new staff member to help the workgroup with its effort to earn the AARP designation.
“I’m just so happy I can’t even begin to tell you,” Gail Lovelace, the co-chair of the Age-Friendly College Park initiative, said. “I’m just thrilled that the city is still committed to moving forward with this designation.”
According to Holz, membership in the network “provides cities, towns, counties and states with the resources to become more age-friendly by tapping into national and global research, planning models and best practices.”
The city’s volunteer Senior Advisory Committee (SAC) began working toward the designation in 2020, with a focus on five of AARP’s eight domains of livability: housing, transportation, social participation, respect and social inclusion, and communication and information.
Members of the Age-Friendly College Park workgroup, an arm of SAC, have said they hope the city will earn the designation by next summer.
It takes approximately five years to complete the steps required to earn the designation, Holz said.
The steps, Holz said, cover: including older residents in all stages of the age-friendly process; conducting a community needs assessment; developing an action and evaluation plan based on the assessment results; putting the goals of the plan into action; assessing the impact of the plan and submitting progress reports; sharing solutions, successes and best practices with other communities that have or are working toward the designation; and continually repeating those steps.
“I think that we need, as a city, to make College Park a place that people want to retire to and people want to continue living here,” Mackie said. “And unfortunately, we’ve lost a lot of really good, active people because they’ve gone to live in other senior communities. So this is helping College Park to embrace the senior community.”
Mary Anne Hakes, SAC’s co-chair, said the committee’s goal is “to make College Park an age-friendly community for all ages … to allow people to age in place and a secret desire to make College Park a retirement destination.”
To that end, Hakes said, the workgroup created a series of “did you know” articles on local resources for seniors for publication in local media; reached out to every College Park civic association and city committee, offered feedback to city officials about the redesigned website, and partnered with Youth, Family and Senior Services Department to teach line dancing classes.
Other projects have included coordinating a Tai Chi class with the College Park Arts Exchange, working with University of Maryland students to develop an infographic on emergency preparedness, and helping arrange for Attick Towers residents to attend concerts at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.
In addition, the city has made sidewalk and traffic light improvements, repaired the Old Parish House and partnered with the College Park Community Preservation Trust to offer homebuyers homes at below-market prices.
“While a lot of our work is focused on seniors, when we think about age-friendly, it’s all ages,” Lovelace said. “This is not just seniors. We believe if we make something better for seniors, we’re also making things better for other people in the community.”
Holz agreed.
“The goal is to make communities more livable for everyone,” Holz said. “When a community becomes more accessible and welcoming for older adults, it benefits people of all ages.”
