MANKATO — With the population increasingly skewing older, hundreds of communities are intentionally working to become more attractive places for elderly people to live, work and play.
On Monday night, the Mankato City Council is expected to officially commit to doing the same. The North Mankato City Council will be asked to follow suit on Feb. 20 — applying to become an Age-Friendly Community that vows to assess the needs of the elderly and the availability of resources for them across a huge range of categories.
It’s a critically important step, according to Melinda Wedzina, the CEO of VINE Faith in Action.
“The most important reason is that as a nation, we are aging,” Wedzina said. “There’s 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day from now until 2030.”
Three decades after that, one of every four people in the United States will be 65 or older.
VINE, a nonprofit dedicated to working toward the well-being and quality of life of older residents in the Mankato area, has spearheaded the move to join the AARP-coordinated Age-Friendly States and Communities Network. Discussions of the idea have been ongoing since August with Mankato City Manager Susan Arntz, North Mankato City Administrator Kevin McCann, public health agencies for Blue Earth and Nicollet counties, the medical community, the Greater Mankato Diversity Council and several other organizations.
Minnesota is already in the network as an “Age-Friendly State,” and the World Health Organization is pushing the concept in other nations around the globe.
The Mankato City Council appeared enthusiastic about the idea at a recent work session and is expected to pass a resolution Monday night supporting an application to the program.
Joining the network is just a first step and doesn’t mean a community has accomplished the program’s goals, Wedzina said.
“That doesn’t mean you are an Age-Friendly Community already,” she said. “That means your community is determined and dedicated to becoming age-friendly.”
It also provides access to the good ideas and successes of communities that are further along the process, Wedzina said, mentioning Northfield and Maple Grove as examples.
“We don’t need to be geniuses and come up with everything (from scratch),” she said.
Arntz said Mankato already has the foundation in place to be a good place for older residents to live. The five-year strategic plan the city is in the process of developing is expected to prioritize the creation of more housing options at a variety of prices for residents of all ages. And in preliminary discussions of the strategic plan, city leaders emphasized the importance of more recreational opportunities for residents, improved transit programs for people who don’t drive and improvements to roads and trails.
“So those are things that would fit nicely into an application,” Arntz said.
AARP already assesses the livability of communities across America whether they’re in the program or not, and Mankato actually scores well above the average. The city has a current score of 61 out of a 0-100 scale where 50 is average.
Joining the network would provide access to some grant opportunities to work on developing policies to boost the city’s score. And it would be an ongoing reminder to focus on issues and services for the growing number of older residents.
“What are the things we do now and what are some of the things we’d want to work on?” Arntz summarized.
Minnesota is one of only 10 states in the network, but the members include large-population states such as California, Florida and New York. More than 700 cities and counties have joined.
“Participation in the network involves following a multi-step process of improvement,” according to AARP, which provides links to how each member performs on the 61 indicators that aim to judge a community’s attentiveness to the needs of older residents and its attributes as a good place for them to live.
The measures focus on housing affordability and access, transportation alternatives, environmental quality and health. They also aim to judge whether a community makes it easier for residents to be engaged with the wider population — looking at such issues as broadband access and speed, voting rates and the presence of cultural, arts and entertainment institutions. A final category aims to measure opportunity — the availability of jobs, the degree of income equality and the diversity of age groups in the community.
Wedzina said the local organizing panel, using a $27,000 state grant, has already surveyed about 600 people and has decided to focus first on three categories related to boosting the social environment for older residents. The hope now is to get a grant extension of about $50,000 to develop a detailed action plan and begin implementation of some of the ideas by the summer of 2025.
Getting traction in those three categories could then lead to an expanded focus on some of the other five areas. And that could result in a different sort of expansion of the program in the years that follow.
“What we do in Mankato-North Mankato could lead to encompassing a larger geographic area like Blue Earth County and Nicollet County as well,” Wedzina said.
Among the 22 Minnesota cities and counties already in the Age-Friendly Communities network, scores range from West St. Paul (65) to Freeborn County (51). Nationwide, San Francisco (66) is the top-scoring major city, with Madison, Wisconsin (67), Portland, Maine (68) and Aspen, Colorado (73) leading the way in lower population categories.
For comparison, Mankato’s livability score of 61 trails St. Paul (66), Rochester (65), New Ulm (65) and Minneapolis (64), while matching Duluth (61) and surpassing St. Peter (60), North Mankato (59) and St. Cloud (57).
Although the program focuses on resources particularly important to people as they grow older, many of the improvements will benefit residents of all ages, Wedzina said. She compares it to the initiative to install curb cuts wherever sidewalks meet streets. The primary motivation was to remove barriers for people who use wheelchairs, but the curb cuts make life easier for everyone from a mother pushing a stroller to a deliveryman using a dolly cart.