Age Friendly

Chapter 3: Planning
Task Two:
Set Up the Older People’s Council
Bringing older people together to check through the draft strategy is best done
in the context of the first formal meeting of the Older People’s Council. Use the
event as an opportunity to celebrate growing old in your county as well as a way
of checking with older people that their concerns have been raised and will be
prioritised in the forthcoming Age Friendly Strategy. Invite people to register as
members of the Older People’s Council on the way into the meeting.
Choose a local well known local person or champion of older people’s issues and
ask him/her to come along to the event. Make sure to invite everyone who has
expressed an interest in joining the Older People’s Council. Advertise the event
in local press, publicise it on local radio and send posters to all your contact
organisations, asking them to put them on their noticeboards. Write a press
release to send out on the morning of the first meeting.
Have a photographer lined up to take a few photographs to send to local press
later in the day. In many ways, a lively photograph with a carefully worded
caption would be the best publicity from the event as you will aim to have wider
coverage of the forthcoming strategy launch.
The Older People’s Council is the cornerstone of the entire Age Friendly Cities and
Counties programme. Having older people involved in the Age Friendly Cities and
Counties programme is essential to ensure that organisations respond to the real
concerns and issues of older people, rather than what they identify them to be. The
Age Friendly City/County Coordinator will already have a list of people interested in
joining the Older People’s Council, following on from the launch of the programme
and the various consultations. There are a few different ways of publicising that the
Age Friendly Cities and Counties programme is setting up an Older People’s Council.
How the Older People’s Council was formed in County Louth:
In County Louth, Mary Deery and Rodd Bond organised a separate consultation
process to set up the Older People’s Council. “ We conducted an audit of all
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