Age Friendly Cities

Summary: mecwacare recently sponsored a Council on The Ageing (COTA) event and was involved the celebration for the UN International Day of Older Peopleon the 1st October 2007. Melbourne was one of 33 cities around the world that took part in the WHO global Age-Friendly Cities Initiative.

mecwacare Chief Executive, Ms Michelle Lewis,  was invited by Sue Hendy, Executive Director of COTA to the ‘Age Friendly Cities and Victorian Seniors Conference’ to celebrate the UN International day of Older People and to help highlight the relationship between the two organisations.

Event presenter Dr Kathleen Brasher from Melbourne University and was attended by 150 individuals and included a variety of guest speakers. Department of Human Services, Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Telmo Languiller performed the Official Opening of the event.

Mr Dick Gross (MAV) and Ms Merle Mitchell (Chair, Mac Senior Victorians) attended the launch and individually demonstrated their strong support for the ‘Age Friendly Cities Initiative’ program which included a variety of seminars for workers in the ageing sector, policy makers and seniors who found the information highly beneficial.

The objective of the ‘Age Friendly Cities’ initiative was to identify concrete indicators of an age-friendly city and produce an ‘Age Friendly City Guide’ to stimulate and guide advocacy, community development and policy change to make urban communities age-friendly.

Older people are a significant and growing part of our local communities. Alex Kalache (WHO Director of Ageing and Life Course Program) said ‘In all countries and in developing countries in particular, measures to help older people remain healthy and active are a necessity, not a luxury’.

Numerous Cities around the world are involved in the project to help increase awareness of local needs, gaps and good ideas for improvement in order to stimulate development for more age-friendly urban settings. Some of these countries include Australia, Germany, U.S.A, China, Japan, Ireland, U.K, Russia, Italy, Jamaica and Kenya.

Ms Lewis said ‘Statistics demonstrate that world ageing trends are rapidly changing. The world’s population is aging and we are living a lot longer than we did fifty or so years ago. Life expectancy at birth is increasing in all regions and research shows that women have a longer life expectancy than men’.

In a nutshell the ‘Developed world became rich before it became old whilst developing countries are becoming old before they become rich.