Age Friendly Ireland actively promotes partnerships and collaborations. The Age Friendly Cities and Counties Programme is run by effective city- and county-based Alliances, involving senior decision-makers from public, commercial and not-for-profit organisations. Age Friendly Ireland assists Alliances aim to streamline the work of all key players at local level, putting the views, interests and needs of older people at their core. Through an Older People’s Council in each participating local authority area older people exercise a strong, guiding influence on age-friendly local development.
Age Friendly Ireland provides guidance to the Alliances as they engage and consult widely with older people. The Age Friendly City and County Strategies which the Alliances draw up are based squarely on the expressed views, needs and interests of older people. Through an Alliance’s Age Friendly Strategy, participating service providers and businesses become accountable to each other, and to older people, for the age-friendly actions they take.
Age Friendly Ireland develops tools and methodologies for age-friendly practitioners at frontline and management levels. It works as a hub for knowledge transfer, brokering connections and information exchange between agency officials, service providers and older people, both locally and nationally. The aim is to foster the exchange of age-friendly best practices that older people want and value, and which are appropriate, sustainable and cost-effective.
Age Friendly Ireland offers access to valid, reliable and timely evidence on the lives of older people in Ireland through its partnership with the Department of Health and the HSE on the Healthy and Positive Ageing Initiative (HaPAI). This work offers a baseline against which Ireland can measure progress on positive ageing.