As Archstone Foundation pursues our new strategic direction, we are shifting from planning to execution. This moment invites us to reflect on the broader framework that guides how we approach the work ahead and how we connect with partners across sectors.
In recent months, I have been thinking about a simple way to describe the interconnected ideas at the center of our strategy. Three pillars help frame our vision: aging, health equity, and social justice.
These pillars are not separate priorities. They are deeply interconnected with our goals and aims. Together, they help clarify the sectors we hope to work across, the partners we want to engage, and the narrative we believe is necessary to achieve lasting change for older adults.
Aging: Centering Older Adults to Improve Systems
The first pillar is aging itself. At its core, this pillar recognizes that older adults should be at the center of the systems designed to support them.
For too long, decisions about policies, services, and programs have been made without meaningful input from the people most affected by them. Our work seeks to change that dynamic by supporting leadership, organizing, and capacity building among older adults and the organizations that serve them.
This includes creating opportunities for diverse older adults to build leadership skills, share their lived experience, and participate in shaping the systems that affect their daily lives. It also means supporting community-based organizations that have trusted relationships with older adults and can help elevate their priorities in policy and systems discussions.
To ensure that the voices of older adults are central to our grantmaking and operations, we’ve recently engaged Greater Good Studio to help us begin a learning journey across California communities. We want to hear directly from older adults about their experiences to co-design policies, practices, and programs that center their needs. We want to understand the best ways to connect with older adults and their communities consistently so they can inform our work on an ongoing basis.
When older adults help shape the solutions, the results are more relevant, more responsive, and more grounded in the realities of everyday life.
Health Equity: Expanding Access to Care and Support
The second pillar is health equity. Older adults experience significant differences in access to health care and supportive services depending on where they live, their income, their race or ethnicity, and a range of other structural factors. Addressing these disparities requires a deliberate focus on removing barriers that prevent people from getting the care and support they need.
Our work in this area focuses on helping connect older adults to the systems and services designed to support them, while also promoting policies that improve access, affordability, and quality of care. We also recognize the importance of translating research and new policy developments into practical information that communities can use to navigate, make sense of, and ultimately change complex systems.
For example, our support to San Ysidro Health Center will develop a system to identify pre-Medicare participants and provide patient education and Medicare enrollment navigation to ensure they receive continuous, quality care. Culturally and linguistically aligned supports within healthcare systems like these are needed to help people, particularly those with low health insurance literacy, enroll in a timely manner, apply for Medicare Savings Programs and low-income subsidies, and navigate complicated application processes.
Health equity means ensuring every older adult has the opportunity to receive the care and support they need to live with dignity, independence, and security. Achieving that goal requires collaboration across sectors, including health care providers, community organizations, policymakers, and advocates.
Social Justice: Addressing the Root Causes of Inequity
Our third pillar is social justice. Many of the challenges older adults face today are the result of long-standing structural inequities. Ageism, racism, ableism, and economic inequality shape how systems operate and who benefits from them.
Addressing these systemic issues requires more than improving individual programs or services. It requires confronting the underlying forces that produce inequity in the first place.
Through this pillar, we will support advocacy, organizing, and policy efforts that seek to shift power and resources toward historically marginalized communities. This work centers older adults who face the greatest barriers, including those with lower incomes, communities of color, immigrants, rural residents, LGBTQ+ older adults, and others whose voices have too often been absent from policy discussions.
A key example of this is our work to uncover the effects of immigration enforcement violence on the long-term care economy in California. We are working with NORC at the University of Chicago to develop quick and ready-to-use data points for our advocacy partners fighting against these cruel actions in real time. We will continue to pay close attention to key advocacy opportunities and the role we can play in these important policy battles.
Social justice provides the broader context for our work. It reminds us that improving systems for older adults also means advancing fairness and dignity across society.
Working at the Intersection
These three ideas are most powerful where they intersect. Together, they will guide how we think about partnerships, investments, and initiatives. I saw the power of this last fall when Archstone Foundation collaborated with eleven organizations — Metta Fund, The California Wellness Foundation, The California Endowment, Sierra Health Foundation, Blue Shield of California Foundation, The SCAN Foundation, California Health Care Foundation, LA84 Foundation, IEHP Foundation, Inland Empire Community Foundation, and Capitol Impact — to support a nonpartisan forum with gubernatorial candidates and community leaders about building a healthier California. While the forum covered many topics related to achieving health equity — behavioral health, single payer health care, housing, social determinants of health and more — we worked to include the intersection of aging issues with each of these rather than as a standalone issue.
This intersection also reinforces something that sits at the heart of our strategy: Lasting change does not happen through isolated efforts. It happens when communities, organizations, and institutions work together to reshape systems in ways that reflect shared values and collective experience.
Moving from Framework to Action
As we continue implementing our strategic plan, these ideals will help guide the choices we make about where to focus our time, energy, and resources.
This framing does not provide all the answers, but it offers a way to think about and guide the work we have ahead. By grounding our efforts in aging, health equity, and social justice, we can help build systems that reflect the priorities, dignity, and lived experience of older adults themselves.
And in doing so, we move closer to the vision that guides our work every day: a future where every older adult can thrive as they age.
