Communities working to become age- and dementia friendly often identify needs or opportunities that can be addressed through advocacy on a local level.

To help stakeholders influence and improve local government policy for healthy aging, the Massachusetts Healthy Aging Collaborative added a page on the toolkit section of its website.

The resources are broken down into several categories, including economic security, equity, physical environment and social environment. As age- and dementia friendly communities engage residents, conduct assessments, and construct action plans based on feedback, the Local Advocacy Guide from MHAC can help provide tactics for accomplishing those goals. It also serves as a library for local advocacy resources that MHAC has collected and created over the years and that can be readily available to healthy aging stakeholders.

MHAC will continue to add resources to this webpage as they become available. If there are comments or questions about the new resource, contact James Fuccione at MHAC.