We live in a time of deep uncertainty. Policymakers proceed to assault the applications older adults depend on for well being care, housing, meals, and primary financial safety. These assaults have an effect on our households and our communities day by day.
As we start a brand new 12 months, it’s necessary to recollect one factor: nothing lasts endlessly. Not even this second.
At Justice in Growing old, we now have a plan to construct a future the place all of us, particularly those that are most marginalized, can age in dignity, safety, and justice. Attaining that future would require us to suppose large. It’s going to require daring, collective motion grounded in a perception in our shared energy to create change.
Making that change would require us, as an growing older advocacy neighborhood, to do three issues directly.
First, we should defend and maintain older adults and the applications they rely on to satisfy their primary wants. That features Social Safety, SSI, Medicare, Medicaid, the Older People Act, the People with Disabilities Act, housing applications, and extra.
Second, we should construct an affirmative coverage agenda for the longer term. We’ll push this and future Administrations and Congresses to take motion that advances the rights of older adults nationwide. Which means rebuilding applications which might be being damaged right now and reimagining methods, so that they higher mirror the realities and promise of longer lives.
Lastly—and simply as importantly—we should work collectively in new methods to construct energy. Energy for older adults. Energy throughout the growing older advocacy neighborhood. We’d like sturdy, related networks of native and state advocates who can elevate up the voices of older adults by the media, within the courts, and with policymakers.
These three efforts are inseparable. Every depends upon the others to succeed.
We are able to defend applications when communities have the ability and instruments to push again towards dangerous proposals. We are able to construct sturdy coverage for the longer term once we perceive right now’s threats and pay attention carefully to how they have an effect on individuals’s lives. And we are able to construct lasting energy by participating older adults straight—centering what issues most to them.
Carried out collectively, these three issues will set us on the right track for a future the place our methods are higher positioned than ever earlier than to satisfy our wants as we age.
It is a troublesome second, and none of us is aware of what tomorrow will deliver. However we do know this isn’t a time to retreat or hand over on our collective imaginative and prescient of growing older with justice. It is a time to behave boldly.
I can’t wait to reimagine and construct that future with you.
Keep tuned for normal updates from Justice in Growing old, together with concrete methods to accomplice with us by storytelling, coverage growth, shared advocacy, and extra.
Thanks for all you do and Completely satisfied New Yr.
