ENGAGING OLDER WOMEN IN YOUR COMMUNITY A Promising Practices Guide for Women’s and Senior ServingOrganizations

Engaging Older Women in your Community is a promising practices tool developed as an outcome of the Older Women’s Dialogue Project (OWDP). The publication is intended to support your agency to anticipate and address structural barriers to the participation of older women in community initiatives aimed at legal and policy change. We include key questions to explore, tips for enhancing organizational capacity to include older women, and examples from our experience throughout the OWDP. All of the ideas contained in this resource reflect what we learned through our work with older women living in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.

This guide will be of interest to anyone who works with older women. It was created to enhance the capacity of practitioners from all sectors, including law, policing, government, health care, finance, social services, and housing to consider the impact of both aging and gender on the experiences of older women, and to include older women more actively in agency initiatives. The purpose of this guide is to share the lessons learned from our work with older women. We anticipate the guide will be of particular interest to stakeholders working in:

•Senior and women’s based social services sectors

•Organizations who employ older women as paid staff, volunteers, or in a leadership capacity

•Government and policy development

•Participatory based action research and community development projects with older women