Citizens League’s Focus on Aging: It’s All About People, Not Experts

February 6, 2008
|In Our Blog
|By origineight

Yesterday we wrote about the fragmentation in public policy around aging. The Citizens League in Minnesota, which is one of the country’s top non-partisan citizen engagement and public policy organizations is taking a different approach to aging policy as part of their MAP 150 initiative, which is focused on big public policy issues in Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial Year.Here’s how they describe the approach, which will begin at the League’s Feb. 28th Policy Open House event:

  • Long-term care policy design workshop – While there is broad consensus that the current long-term care system is inadequate and anachronistic, reform efforts are having trouble gaining any traction. The Citizens League has a hypothesis about why this might be so: most policy design efforts attempt to fix the system’s problems rather than people’s problems. This policy design workshop will take a different approach. We will start with users’ needs (or a ‘market assessment’) and try to identify a ‘product’ for the long-term care system that can meet these needs. We will also specify the features of that product so that system designers have a set of ground rules by which to develop the product.

    • Ecumen is sponsoring the first phase of this project. However, we have no clue what the outcome will be. And that’s the beauty of the Citizen League’s work – it’s transparent, independent, citizen-based work – You can’t buy an outcome. They’ve done incredible work on some of Minnesota’s biggest public policy issues, including a report about 12 years ago on the future of aging in Minnesota. It helped to bring focus to aging services policy and enhance opportunities for independence for more seniors. What also is interesting is how they bring people together to help shape solutions that you would think would never sit down with each other.To learn more about this project and participate in it, go here. Changing Aging readers from around the country can follow it on their web site and we’ll provide periodic updates.