The 2025 Archstone Foundation Award for Excellence in Program Innovation was presented to Village Movement California (VMC) at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting this week.
The award recognizes VMC’s Village Incubator, which empowers communities to organize and create their own unique villages to address the needs of a growing aging population. Villages are neighborhood-based membership organizations that connect older adults to the community, programming, and expertise they need to continue living lives of purpose and promise while remaining in their own homes.
The incubator provides a learning community, workshops, curriculum, and coaching to implement villages. The curriculum guides communities through a six-phase interactive process that takes the user from the initial stages of community assessment and identifying potential partners, to engaging future village members and volunteers and determining the operational and governance structure, to officially launching the new village. As early supporters of the village movement in California, Archstone Foundation is proud that VMC received this recognition from APHA, which demonstrates the lasting impact of building coalitions and networks among villages across the state and across the country.
Pictured above: Carly Roman-Woo, PhD, Archstone Foundation Program Officer with Kate Hoepke, VMC Board Chair & Founding Partner, who accepted the award on behalf of VMC.
The Archstone Foundation Award for Excellence in Program Innovation is an annual award, established in 1997 through an endowment, to recognize best practice models in the field of aging and public health. By providing national recognition to these programs, Archstone Foundation hopes that it will enable these model programs to be replicated, and to continue to be evaluated in an effort to enhance innovative services for older adults throughout the U.S.
