About Silos to Circles Age Well Initiative:

The Silos to Circles Age Well Initiative is designed to strengthen local connections to aging services for seniors, their families, and neighbors. Too often, community members don’t know what’s available—and sometimes providers feel like “the best-kept secret in town.”

The Community Guide represents three years of lessons learned by four rural Minnesota pilot projects. The common goal of the four pilots was: increasing awareness of, and connectedness to, the full continuum of local supports for those aging in rural communities. This Community Guide is intended to help areas, towns, and cities develop their own initiative to make their community a better place for aging.

IN THE BEGINNING

This work is part of a larger effort called Silos to Circles that aims to break-down barriers between social services, community services, and health care. A broad group of 50+ organizations, agencies, and businesses became a network focused on community health and system health. The aim is to experiment and share things that have worked. A key purpose of the network is to encourage and support collaboration.

THE SILOS TO CIRCLES AGE WELL PILOTS

This Silos to Circles network identified aging services as one promising area for breaking down silos at the local level. A regional foundation serving rural Minnesota communities awarded a substantial grant to LeadingAge MN Foundation (www.leadinagemn.org/foundation) to test a coalition-based effort grounded in the collective action principle of collaboration and shared decision-making.
Four communities were selected as pilots: Moorhead, Perham, Crosby, and Southern Chisago County. Each received a subgrant ($150,000) over two years from the larger foundation-funded grant. Pilot teams used grant funds to support a part-time project coordinator, a part-time resource navigator, website development, and other project-related expenses.

The Collective Action Lab www.collectiveactionlab.com and LeadingAge MN Foundation provided technical assistance during implementation.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Visit www.stcmn.org to see the pilot projects’ websites.
If you have questions about information in the Community Guide, please contact the LeadingAge MN Foundation program officer at tfoley@leadingagemn.org.