Innovation Showcase Videos

Richard Amore: Hello, I'm Richard Amore with the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development, and I lead the state's placemaking efforts through the Better Places program. Our places determine our health, wealth, and happiness more than anything else. Building community pride and social capital is the key to rural economic development.

And there's no better marketing, tourism draw, or talent recruitment strategy than investing in vibrant places where people want to live, work and visit. And before any marketing brochure, website, or ad campaign — the community's character, its streets, its public spaces — is the first and most important economic development message that a community can deliver on.

And I'd like to share one program in Vermont that's helping Vermonters build better places. The State of Vermont's Better Places program is a community matching grant program, empowering Vermonters to create inclusive and vibrant public spaces. It's a new grant program that's about building community and fostering deep collaborations, not just implementing projects.

The program supports community led projects that create, revitalize or activate community gathering areas, bringing people together, and building welcoming and thriving places through a crowd granting approach. Using a pool of grant funds from the state to match donor contributions allows local funding to go further, multiplying the impact 2-to-1 and gaining vested donors and project supporters in the process.

Now I'd like to share a few local project examples that are advancing local placemaking efforts, building community connections and creating places for Vermonters to gather and enjoy one another. Local leaders in Brattleboro utilize a Better Places grant for a downtown mural and transform an eyesore in their community.

The mural is located on a gateway street into their downtown, and there was this long, dilapidated, old retaining wall over the years that's been repeatedly defaced with graffiti. By reclaiming this space with a community mural, engaging the residents in its design, funding and painting, the community created a beautiful and welcoming atmosphere for residents and visitors in the downtown. What an amazing effort, led by the community, for the community, truly making a better place to be in Brattleboro.

And in Rutland, they transformed Center Street into a safe place to gather, shop and dine-in downtown — and have fun with colorful crosswalks, festive parklets and lawn games, including adding a community mural on City Hall.

And in Saint Johnsbury, they hosted a summer event series to help fill the streets of downtown with energy, excitement and vitality.

And, in a time with increasing polarization and inequality, it's an imperative that everyone who works in community and economic development work as hard as we can to create reasons for people of different backgrounds and experiences to share space and joy. In closing, the design of our communities, our streets, and our public spaces, they matter.

This is the places in our communities where we connect with one another, feel welcome and included, and celebrate culture and community together—inviting all ages, genders, and backgrounds to participate.  And they demand our constant support, love, and investments to remain healthy, vibrant, and welcoming places for all.

Thank you for your time and attention today. I leave you with think big, start small, build better places right now. Thank you.

 

Jill Johanning: Hello, my name is Jill Johanning, and I'm an architect at Alpha One Disability and Aging Solutions. As Maine's Center for Independent Living, we have worked with many of Maine's age-friendly communities, and local, small and large businesses help improve access in creative and affordable ways.

We also work for all Maine families to improve awareness about the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and for opportunities for going beyond the minimum requirements. I would like you to consider the following simple points that will make your business more accessible to more customers.

To start, accessibility needs to be part of the conversation about investing for a sustainable business. If customers cannot remain engaged with your business as abilities change, we are not maintaining or creating sustainable communities.

Being accessible and providing programming to families with mobility. Vision, hearing, and other disabilities makes a business more welcoming to increase new and repeat customers. Access to your business may not be that hard to achieve once it is considered. When you update, remodel or build your business, there is a chance to install easy-to-use features and plan for all customers.

Offering a great business environment does not depend just on the physical space. Providing exceptional customer experiences through attitudes and actions by employees is just as important to make sure that everyone feels welcome and respected. All businesses have ongoing maintenance and updates to be successful, and should consider accessibility with all improvements, especially as technology offers new ways to reach more customers.

Temporary events and seasonal weather are other ways to plan for opportunities to accommodate everyone in a safe and convenient manner. Inclusive design means planning and creating places.

Businesses that plan to for all. Businesses that plan to accommodate mobility devices, service animals, different communication needs and maintain access provides a better experience for all. Real progress in access for all will require more public awareness and a shift in attitude from everyone.

Businesses need to support initiatives for better livability for all generations. and demand good design to make socially sustainable communities for all. As the main affiliate of the New England ADA Center, Alpha One encourages you to contact your regional ADA Center for additional assistance and resources for businesses.

Thank you for considering that good access is good business for everyone.

 

Joel Dock: Hello, my name is Joel Dock. I am with Louisville Metro's Office of Planning here in Louisville, Kentucky. My office is responsible for the administration of the zoning and subdivision regulations for all of Louisville, Jefferson County.

Louisville Metro is made up of roughly 800,000 people across urban, suburban, and rural places. Today, I'm going to highlight the important role Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, play in supporting economic opportunity. I would like to start by thanking AARP for this opportunity and the tremendous support that they've given to Louisville Metro in our land use reform efforts. Reforming zoning regulations in Louisville to allow possibilities like Accessory Dwelling Units would not have been possible without their support. If you are in government or community development, I encourage you to reach out, if you have not already done so, to your local or state AARP representatives. Or check out the many resources that they have online for housing solutions.

So what is an ADU, or an Accessory Dwelling Unit? It's a second, small home on your property. It could be a garage conversion into a unit. It could be a second story addition onto a garage. It could be a basement apartment, or it could be a home addition for an additional housing unit. It can be so many different things to provide additional housing in areas near places of employment.

ADUs provide housing choices for people in all stages of their life, from the college graduate that is entering the workforce, to individuals that seek to age in place in their neighborhoods that they've lived in for decades and are accustomed to the businesses and services in that area. So how did we get to this point where we're talking about Accessory Dwelling Units?

Housing solutions like ADUs in Louisville resulted from efforts of the Land Development Code reform and the city's comprehensive plan, Plan 2040. Recognizing that zoning patterns, specifically single-family zoning (one home on one lot), which occupies 75 percent of land in Louisville, severely restricts the delivery of housing choices to all members of our community and limits the availability of housing near places of employment, ADU regulations were amended and adopted in 2021 to allow ADUs as a choice in all single-family zoning districts.

A quality job and opportunity is restricted by the burdens of unaffordable or unavailable housing near places of employment and commercial areas. Changing zoning regulations to allow ADUs and other housing solutions like middle housing increases economic opportunity and the choices available near these centers, decreases travel time to work and reduces the overall cost of living for our workforce. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

 

Dorian Grilley: I'm Dorian Grilley with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota, a statewide education and advocacy nonprofit.

We recognize that biking and walking are not the only solutions to community development, but most agree they are part of the solution and that the return on investment is high. Today I'm going to talk about the Bicycle-Friendly Community program of the League of American Bicyclists and our implementation partners at the state and local level.

The first step is to recognize that you can't just build infrastructure and hope that people will use it. You must also invest in the education and community engagement that will maximize your return on investment. Minnesota has 35 bike-friendly communities. There are also 119 bicycle-friendly businesses and seven universities.

Many more are working on applications. The motivations are simple. To people of all ages, a bicycle-friendly ranking means your community is a great place to live and your business is a great place to work. The bicycle-friendly program has also been embraced by the public health community, the Statewide Health Improvement Partnership funds, among other things, physical activity coordinators in the county and larger city health departments.

The state DOT has also embraced biking and walking. They actively pursue complete street solutions when they are rebuilding the main streets in many communities. They also fund local infrastructure, education, encouragement and safety programming, and a statewide system of bike routes. The state Health Department and DOT have been the biggest champions.  Add in local leaders and advocates and you get a network that has resulted in Minnesota being one of the most bicycle-friendly states in the nation.

Finally, I'd like to share a 14,000-person city named Fergus Falls. They are an agriculture and tourism community located on the edge of Minnesota's Lake Country. They received a ranking of Bronze in 2015 and were upgraded to Silver in 2019. They also have 25 bike-friendly businesses, which ranks 7th in the nation. The city's downtown has great coffee shops and restaurants, brewpubs, art galleries, senior living apartments, a regional healthcare center, and of course, bike lanes.  Local advocates organize bike rides and events, they offer safety education for children and adults, and they even have a Cycling Without Age pedal-assist pedicab. Fergus Falls is just one example of the many communities in Minnesota that use biking and walking as part of their community development and public health strategies.

If you'd like more information on this work you can contact me. You can also find more details at BikeLeague.org and CyclingWithoutAge.org.

 

Hayden Black Walker: Hello, my name is Hayden Black Walker. I'm a member of the National Freeway Fighters Network and I lead Reconnect Austin, a proposal to reconfigure Interstate 35 in Austin, Texas.

Today, I want to discuss highways, what went wrong in the past, and where we can improve. The U.S. built the largest infrastructure program in history: the Federal Interstate program. It was designed to connect communities, but it also built highways through communities, destroying existing neighborhoods and creating walls between people.

We built the same thing everywhere in a relatively short period of time. Now, as highways near the end of their lifespans, there's a growing movement to understand the full impact and revisit those decisions. As a new report from Smart Growth America notes, low-income communities and communities of color have been, and continue to be, disproportionately harmed by our approach to transportation in the United States.

We've all experienced the many costs associated with highways. They are congested, they cause air and noise pollution, crashes can cause serious injuries and death, they contribute to climate change, they depress land values. But they don't have to. While many cities are still building highways according to the 20th century's status quo, some are rethinking how highways operate. They're offering creative solutions that connect people, rather than separating them, that are better for the climate, that slow cars down, and encourage people to walk, bike and roll. These projects are happening around the world and across the United States. And they're showing us that when we're willing to rethink our highways, we can preserve neighborhoods, add green space, connect communities, and promote economic development.

For 70 years, we've been told that highways foster economic growth because they facilitate freight and long-distance trips. Highways do allow the efficient movement of goods and people, but we've learned over time that they also do a lot of damage when they are put through productive urban environments. They hurt residents, land values, and development in the cities that they bisect. Projects can creatively rethink highways, create place, and in doing so, foster new growth in the heart of the city. These projects typically lead to land values doubling or tripling in just the first five years after construction.

When we rethink highways, we create sustainable, growing places. Join us in the conversation to change the paradigm around highways and rethink how, or if, we build them. You can find more information on our website and through the National Freeway Fighters Network. Thank you so much for your time today.

 

Tanya Rohrbach: Designing communities so we can all age in community not only provides benefits for older adults, places designed to be great places to age promote economic sustainability for municipality, and improve livability for everyone in the community. I'm going to describe what we at New Jersey Future have learned about creating great places to age based on our work doing comprehensive, age-friendly land use planning with communities in New Jersey.

Creating great places to age creates great places to live, regardless of age. Concentrated development and multimodal transportation networks keep people of all ages active and connected to their communities and bring foot traffic to businesses. Town centers support vibrant commercial districts when they include homes for people to live within walking distance.

Creating these places requires local governments to proactively use the mechanisms of land use control at their disposal, including adopting age-friendly master plans, zoning and land use rules, and design standards for the built environment. To accelerate the implementation of great places to age, we've conceptualized a partnership model for local governments and age-friendly community initiative groups to work together.

The central ingredient to this model is initiation. A champion can spark a dialogue and action on community livability, whether they are in a local government or are a community member.  We're excited to designate a multi-sectorial committee that pursues assessment and action in partnership with community members and groups. We developed a methodology for towns to review their built environments of today, and their land use policies and regulations that will create their built environments of tomorrow.

New Jersey Futures Community Guide to Implementing Age-Friendly Land Use Decisions provides a step-by-step process for any community to conduct an age-friendly land use assessment. The assessment evaluates the extent that a community has a mixed use, pedestrian-friendly town center that supports the local economy and housing needs, whether the community has enough types of housing and housing that is affordable, how easy it is to get around without a car, and if there's a safe network of pedestrian infrastructure throughout the town—and ease of access to public facilities and amenities so that everyone can interact socially and physically within the community.

We want to make it easy for towns to be age-friendly advocates and embed these principles into local policies, regulations, practices and decisions. That's why we developed an action with Sustainable Jersey and others within their program based on our guidebook. The Community Design for All Ages action in the Sustainable Jersey program helps communities do an age-friendly assessment, create an action plan, and implement actions that will create more great places to age across the Garden State.

These resources can be a model for creating great places to age in any community. My name is Tanya Rohrbach, Community Planning Manager at New Jersey Future. You can contact me at the email address on the screen.

 

Donna Kastner: Hi, I'm Donna Kastner, Delmar Encore Fellow with the Dayton Foundation and champion for the Miami Valley Age-Friendly Network, which includes 12 communities in Dayton, Ohio.

Scanning the eight domains of livability, today's talk will focus on employment and the employment domain. And I want to start with a little background. In 2021, I was awarded a fellowship with the foundation to launch Silver is Gold. This was a new program in Dayton, Ohio, and the vision was to connect retired professionals with businesses seeking their wisdom and expertise.

What a great concept, right? Businesses were struggling with recruiting and retaining talent, so we started with meeting with employers. They loved the concept, but we encountered a couple of roadblocks right out of the gate. First and foremost, there was a preference for full-time staff. You know, they would have a 40-hour position they were having struggles filling, and I'd say, well, what about two 20-hour people? Could they do it?

And there was some reluctance there. The other roadblock we hit is we didn't have a deep list of talent. We started with employers when we really needed to start with the candidates. So, we flipped our strategy. And we started building our talent pool, and events were a huge catalyst for that endeavor.

A few comments about how we did this. So, first and foremost, these were not talking heads presentations. These were highly interactive. The participants were given all kinds of opportunities to weigh in, to talk to one another. We'd have 10-minute TED-like talks by experts and then we would have table talk where they might dig into a question or a challenge, and they loved it.

There was a real longing for belonging with this group who were previously working full-time and they didn't have that back and forth. We also looked hard at, you know, you worked a 40-year career. There's a lot of knowledge, skills, and abilities that you have accrued over 40 years. They had lengthy resumes.

Nope. You need to cut it down to one page and what are your top two to three superpowers? What are the things that you enjoy most that you do well and that align with what the workplace is looking for? So, once we had accrued a solid catalog of a talent, things started moving along. We went back to employers and when they shared needs, we could immediately provide, “Hey, here's two or three candidates that that could be a fit.”

They were intrigued, conversations happened, people were hired. It was wonderful. There's more to this story than I could possibly share in a three-minute video presentation, but if you're intrigued, drop me a line, donna@donnacastner.com. And let's schedule a call because I'd be happy to fill you in on a few more things that certainly created this successful endeavor.

 

Megan Langley: Rural innovation: an often sought but unrecognized outcome by large foundations or agencies headquartered outside of rural areas, like North Dakota. “Innovation or progressive thinking just isn't happening in rural places.” This is a sentence I have heard one too many times. “But we are innovative, we are progressive,” I have argued over and over again.

You just don't understand the context of the community in which we are all operating. And it's true. Looking at the definition of innovation — to be not only resourceful but also inclusive and collaborative in community problem solving — there is perhaps no other population that has, by necessity, had to be innovative because of a lack of financial resources and human infrastructure.

Rural innovation often isn't the prettiest or shiniest solution, but it is at times the most effective. Yet it is still incredibly underfunded. Although rural communities contain roughly 59 million people, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, only 7 percent of funds from the top 200 major foundations goes to rural areas.

In my career of writing for grants and seeking investments in rural areas, I've encountered three significant barriers. The first, structural urbanism, is where foundation philosophies and government funding formulas are biased toward density and scale. The second, over-complication of grant processes, where it is nearly impossible for organizations with a limited capacity to compete with larger, urban non-profits.And the third, lack of rural context. Without rural expertise or experience on staff, it can be difficult for grant-makers and foundations to see the potential for impact in rural places.

So, what can we do to support greater investments in all rural communities, including our own? How do we make the case for rural innovation?  Well, number one, we need to advocate for grantmaking programs that prioritize storytelling and limit application hurdles. No jargon, just share your vision for innovation and how you plan to get there. Number two, we need to ask grant-makers to think differently about what a grantee looks like. Not all successful projects will be done within the confines of a typical non-profit system or corporation.

And number three, we need to clearly illustrate the context of our communities. We need to support grant-makers to understand the ripple effects of funding. We can't only communicate impact in terms of size, like how many seniors can be housed, jobs created, dollars multiplied into the local economy. We need to think about the return on investment in terms of the ripple effects on communities.

Perhaps an investment in a rural community's Main Street businesses will create, in the most optimistic scenario, 10 jobs. Well, that number looks pretty good when compared to a local high school graduating class of only 15. All communities, regardless of their size, are important, have potential, and are worth investment.

Please join me in advocating for more with your area grant-makers. Thank you.

 

Erin Mullenix: Hi, I'm Erin Mullenix, Research Director for the Iowa League of Cities and in a shared role with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. I'm joined today by one of my colleagues who will introduce himself in a moment. I wanted to talk about the importance of partnerships when we talk about doing this work around aging in place and making local decisions based off of data that impact our older adults in our communities.

We've established a strong partnership with the League and AARP and our local Iowa chapter, and Iowa State University and other stakeholders. For reference, Iowa is a state full of cities. We have 940 cities with populations ranging from about 10 to over 200,000, and the majority by count are small. We also have an aging population, relatively speaking.

I'll just share a little bit about one of our projects, the AARP Community Challenge Grant. As a part of our grant, the League hosted a workshop to talk to local officials and decision makers around aging in place topics including public finance, housing, transportation and mobility. And the other part of the grant was working with the city of Marshalltown, with a population just under 30,000, on mobility themes, addressing planning updates, and serving vulnerable populations, including older adults.

It was exciting to see them make lasting change through that project. Now, Dr. Dae Jin Kim will tell you more about his research and the research at Iowa State University on aging in place.

 

Daejin Kim: Hi everyone, I'm Daejin Kim, Assistant Professor of Interior Design at Iowa State University. Our pilot study focuses on understanding challenges related to home modification in rural Iowa for aging in place.

Iowa State University's College of Design, AARP Iowa, and city Housing and Redevelopment Authority are collaborating on this project. As a first step, we assessed environmental challenges in older adult housing, and engaged interior design students to develop home modification strategies. As a final step, we completed a home modification project focusing on the bathroom of one of the housing units.

By involving older adults in this process, we aim to create more practical strategies for aging in place in rural areas. This exercise allows students to analyze environmental challenges faced by older adults, especially in rural areas, and propose a design solution to address them, fostering critical thinking and empathy while creating practical ideas for aging in place.

The selected project was shown at a senior center in a rural area where students shared their design strategy. So this experience proved to be valuable for both our students and older adults in rural area as they learned about the significance of home modification for successful aging in place.

 

Jean Ross: Hello, I'm Jean Ross, CEO and co-founder of Primary Record. Rosalynn Carter once said, “there are four distinct groups of people among us. Those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” As a nurse, I've witnessed this truth in action, watching families shoulder caregiving responsibilities without sufficient support.

In 2015, I tried to address this gap by forming a caregiving company with local nurses. Over the six years of running that company, a more solvable problem emerged. Families facing life-altering diagnoses such as cancer, dementia, or rare disease must collect and share organized medical information with a growing care team.

This is due to the inconsistency of electronic health records when exchanging medical data, which is successful 22 to 68 percent of the time. Families cannot rely on these systems, so they create their own from scratch, like a binder, to fill the gap. Unfortunately, this adds to their burden.

Hope lies in the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016. This law mandates a common language for electronic health records, facilitating access to medical data for patients and their caregivers. It penalizes information blocking and embraces innovation for data management. As the number of older adults increases, the number of caregivers will also rise dramatically, affecting families and local economies.

Presently, 30 million Americans balance caregiving with work, yet their best tool … is a binder. Unsurprisingly, over 50 percent of workers report having to arrive late, leave early, or take time off for caregiving. And 14 percent have passed on promotions or quit. Our innovation at Primary Record is transforming the caregiver experience by empowering families with their data and elevating those in the community who can help the most.

Thank you for lending an ear to our vision.