Ambition for Ageing has found out what makes an age-friendly neighbourhood in Greater Manchester from over 3,000 older people. The findings have been released as a report, Building Age-Friendly Neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester and two briefings:

• What Makes an Age-friendly Neighbourhood – a general briefing, exploring what older people have told us what makes neighbourhoods age-friendly.

• How We Build Age-Friendly Neighbourhoods – a practitioners briefing showcasing age-friendly activities taking place across GM and exploring successes and challenges encountered by the Ambition for Ageing programme.

The key findings from the report were:

1. An age-friendly community is integrated. People feel they belong and look after each other. It has participation opportunities, available community resources and spaces and accessible transport and facilities. People feel safe and they are able to find out what is happening in their local area.
2. To create age-friendly neighbourhoods, older people need to have opportunities to connect, participate and contribute.
3. Older people told us they like to spend time with people that are similar to them. This can also include having opportunities to spend time finding out more about their neighbours.
4. Social infrastructure (such as libraries, community centres and bus services) is vital for creating age-friendly neighbourhoods, however, these resources are unequally distributed.
5. Older people are not a homogenous group, as such, opportunities to connect and contribute need to be flexible reflect the diversity of the population.
6. Bringing a range of ages together through intergenerational projects can be effective in strengthening community cohesion and challenging stereotypes.

All three documents are available to download below.