We have a new name—RRF Foundation for Aging—one that pays tribute to our history and signals a bold new direction for our future.
We have a new logo, one that captures the spirit of collaboration, connection, and momentum that drives us forward, along with the five mission-critical facets of the work we support: advocacy, direct service, research, training, and organizational capacity building.
We have a new website, one that lets us spotlight what we’re learning from grantees and provides a platform for ideas and issues that matter.
The most exciting change of all is our new direction, the journey we are beginning as funders, connectors, and agents of change.
As funders, we’ll focus our efforts moving forward on four of the biggest challenges facing older people today:
- Caregiving: Ensuring that care partners (including family, friends, or neighbors) are informed, well-trained, and supported as they care for older people in community settings;
- Housing: Promoting efforts that make housing more affordable and provide coordinated services that enable older people to live safely in community settings;
- Economic Security in Later Life: Ensuring and protecting the economic security and well-being of older people;
- Social and Intergenerational Connectedness: Strengthening social bonds through efforts that promote meaningful social connections, including those that span generations.
As connectors, we will look for more ways to increase our impact by bridging the silos that separate advocacy, direct service, research, and training organizations. Since 1978, we’ve invested nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in the work of grantees in all these areas. So when a small, physician-led initiative to provide direct care to older adults in their homes is ready to grow to scale, who better to offer support that links the model to robust, outcomes-based research, like-minded professional learning collaboratives, and advocacy efforts informing policy reform? With the right connections, a passionate physician’s home-based primary care program is now a sustainable, Medicare-covered service that has reached hundreds of thousands of older people across the country.
As agents of change, we will be more proactive in our grantmaking and more vocal in calling attention to the issues that affect older people. As one of only six foundations devotedly solely to aging, we are one of the single largest repositories of information about what it is to age in America—the challenges we face, the services available and those that aren’t, the work being done and the work still to do. If we share that information more widely, muster support from a greater number of stakeholders, and actively push for solutions, we can accelerate the pace of change.
The issues we’ve chosen to tackle are big, yes, but they are precisely where the need—and ultimate payoff—is greatest.
They are complex, yes, but complexity can be an advantage for problem solvers who are willing to do the work of gathering and analyzing data, connecting the dots, building cases then coalitions, testing models, and championing solutions.
We’re willing to do all those things, and more.
Our goals are audacious, but we’re well prepared to achieve them.
We have insights and ideas to bring to the table, a track record of success, and more than 40 years’ experience collaborating with others, including funders, thought leaders, service providers, and policymakers.
We have deep stores of practical knowledge and expertise, and the excellence and dedication of our grantee partners to inspire us.
Finally, we have a fantastic board and staff with an unwavering commitment to RRF’s mission, vision, and values.
In other words, we have everything we need to shape policies and practices that will improve life for all of us. All that remains is to step out of the shadows, step up to the plate, and get started.
We hope you’ll join us.
