Age–friendly Belfast Charter

Summary

The Age-friendly Belfast Charter is a statement of commitment by participating organisations/businesses to work together towards a more age-friendly city. We worked with a small task group involving Business in the Community, Age NI, Alzheimer’s Society, Danske Bank, Translink and the Greater Belfast Seniors Forum to produce the Age-friendly Charter and some of these organisations will also form a mentoring group.We are asking Belfast organisations to sign up to the following principles: 1. Customer Care – older people would like staff in stores to be friendly, polite and give them extra time when needed 2. Communication – information on services should be straightforward and easy to find. Older people should be visible in advertising and depicted positively3. Accessibility and signage – older people should be able to move easily around premises 4. Valuing an ageing workforce – older staff have training opportunities and support to stay in the workplace.Some simple actions can improve the accessibility and design of our city.Organisations sign up to three simple steps:1. A senior member of the organisation signs the charter agreement and returns to the Age-friendly Belfast team. The organisation is issued with a certificate and sticker to display.2. The organisation carries out an age-friendly checklist assessment and develops a 2-year improvement plan.3. Monitoring will be undertaken by older people or a member of the Age-friendly Belfast Team who will carry out mystery shopper visits and provide feedbackAs this initiative was launched March 2015 we cannot outline it’s impact at this point but have identified the following learning points:• It is important to engage key organisations in the initial sign up-we successfully engaged the main transport provider as the first signatory• We have needed to make key links in order to engage businesses t-we are doing this currently through the chamber of commerce and planning a business breakfast• Small local oranisations are important to people especially as they become less mobile and we are focusing on one specific neighborhood at this pointAn annual Age-friendly Belfast Business Award will be developed to support this Charter

Website: http://www.makinglifebettertogether.com

Key facts

Main target group: business

Other target group(s): Any organisation providing servcies to older people in Belfast

Sector(s): Social protection

Desired outcome for older people:
Learn, grow and make decisions

Other issues the Age-friendly practice aims to address:

Ageism
Accessibility
Intergenerational activities

Contact details

Name: Greer, Elma

Email address: elma.greer@bhdu.org

Preferred language(s): English

Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: None of the above

Older people’s involvement: Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages

Details on older people’s involvement: Older people identified the need for a charter to improve customer care in our Af baseline consultation and they identified the key principles and checklist for te AF assessemt . Older people sit on our planning and monitoring group for the charter, we report on progress to Greater Belfast Seniors Forum and older people will be trained up to carry out Mystery Shopper visits.

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: No

Feedback:
Not yet

Expansion plans:
An annual Age-friendly Belfast Business Award will be developed and we are planning breakfast meetings 3 times per year to promote and provide more information on the Charter and to provide information sessions 4 times per year on: 1. Supporting an inter-generational workforce 2. Dementia awareness training for organisations 3. Supporting and retaining older staff

Looking back

Reflections:
Develop more case studies about examples from similar sized cities. Some of the good practice examples have been from larger cities and these may not be transferable to Belfast

Challenges:
1. Balancing the realistic needs of businesses and the key issues for older people-having practical input from both these groups in the development of the charter2. Engaging a wide range of organisations to sign up to the Charter. We are currently working closely with the Chamber of Commerce and Business in the Community to promote the Charter through their networks.