Efforts to Engage Older Adults' Civic Engagement Help Shape the Agenda of the 2005 White House Conference on Aging

The 2005 White House Conference on Aging (WHCoA) convened from December 11 to 14, 2005, in Washington, D.C., at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Since 1961 the WHCoA has been held once a decade to develop recommendations for the President and Congress on issues, policy and research in the field of aging. (For more information on what a White House Conference on Aging is and how the 2005 conference was organized, click here.)

Much of the conference work took place before the actual conference convened as various organizations sponsored events to collect insights on top aging-relating priorities from the public. The Gerontological Society of America’s “Civic Engagement in an Older America” project led several of these events so as to collect perspectives on older adults’ civic engagement from across the nation.

These events took the form of four town hall-style forums and ten focus groups with older adults across different regions in the U.S. The forums were an opportunity for individuals to meet and hear from the nation’s leading experts on civic engagement, as well as for local service providers to share their approaches for encouraging older adults’ community involvement. The focus groups served to gather more in-depth information on older adults’ views of growing older, their current and projected community involvement, and the future promotion and offering of civic engagement opportunities. (To learn more about the forums, click here to read a summary of these events. To learn more about the findings from the focus groups, click here for the executive summary, and click here for the full report.)

From these events, GSA's civic engagement project leaders identified five priority issues relating to older adults’ civic engagement:

(1) Modernize the nation’s senior and civic service programs.
(2) Remove barriers to community civic engagement.
(3) Link adult volunteers with appropriate and rewarding civic engagement opportunities.
(4) Improve public awareness of volunteering and civic service as a critical component of healthy aging and healthy communities.
(5) Encourage companies to support and promote volunteering by their employees and retirees.

These priorities were submitted to the 2005 WHCoA organizers to help identify potential priorities for conference attendees to discuss and consider. (To learn more about the specific recommendations made to conference organizers, click here to access a summary.)

The WHCoA organizers posited 73 resolutions, among which five related to civic engagement:

(1) Develop a national strategy for promoting new and meaningful volunteer activities and civic engagements for current and future seniors
(2) Promote lifelong learning and e-literacy for older adults.
(3) Increase awareness of the positive physical and psychological impact that arts participation can have on older Americans.
(4) Reauthorize the national and community service act to expand opportunities for volunteer and civic engagement activities.
(5) Develop programs and services promoting use of public libraries among the older adults and baby boomer population.

When the conference convened, delegates voted resolutions #1 and #4 as being among the top 50 priorities for recommendations to Congress and the President from the 2005 White House Conference on Aging.

To view the final report of the 2005 conference, click here.