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From Programs to Policy: What States Are Teaching Us About Creative Aging

What does it take to make creativity a meaningful part of how communities support people as they age?

That question brought 48 state leaders from across the West together in Salt Lake City this summer for Lifetime Arts’ first Creative Aging Leadership Summit. They came from arts agencies, aging services, libraries, health, veterans services, and other sectors. Some represented states with years of creative aging work behind them. Others were just beginning. But they shared a larger goal: moving creative aging beyond individual programs and into the systems, partnerships, and policies that shape how people age.

The Summit grew out of Lifetime Arts’ work with Western states, but the lessons extend far beyond the region. Across the country, we are working with state and cross-sector leaders who are asking similar questions.

What we heard in Salt Lake City reinforced something important: states have a powerful role to play in making creativity part of healthy aging. And they don’t have to build a new system to do it.

Expanding the Circle: Practical Strategies to Build Support for Creative Aging Messaging Guidebook

This practical guide is designed to help state and local leaders, agencies, advocates, and community partners make a strong, evidence-based case for creative aging as part of healthy aging policy and practice. Inside, you’ll find research, practical tools, and messaging guidance to help explain not only what creative aging is, but why it matters for our health.

While this guide focuses on the health and well-being impacts of creative aging, Lifetime Arts recognizes that the arts also hold deep cultural, civic, emotional, and intrinsic value that cannot always be measured.

Embedding Creative Aging in Healthy Aging Policy and Planning Webinar

Creative aging is no longer a “nice to have” — it’s a high-value strategy for health, connection, and community well-being. The question now is: how do we embed it into policy and systems at scale?

Join Lifetime Arts Executive Director, Heather Ikemire, and nationally recognized aging policy expert, Gretchen Alkema, for a free and focused, 60-minute conversation on what it will take to move creative aging into the mainstream of healthy aging policy and practice. Drawing from Lifetime Arts’ new policy brief, “Creative Aging in the Healthy Aging Ecosystem: Advancing Brain Health, Social Connectedness, and Livable Communities,” this session highlights where creative aging fits in today’s policy landscape and what state and national leaders, local organizations, and private and community funders can do next.

Access presentation slide deck.

From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies

This World Health Organization report illuminates the widespread yet overlooked impacts of social isolation and loneliness on individual health and society as a whole. Based on current evidence, it emphasizes the need for immediate, coordinated action and presents practical, scalable approaches to enhance social connections. calls on policymakers and stakeholders across all sectors to prioritize social health alongside physical and mental health. The report envisions a future where stronger social ties lead to improved well-being, fewer preventable deaths, and reduced social and economic challenges.

2023 International Creative Aging Summit

Paradigm Shift: Advancing the Cultural Rights of Older People

A Free, Virtual Convening on June 6 and 7, 2023

The 3rd annual International Creative Aging Summit channeled the collective energy of more than 250 arts and aging leaders from around the globe towards an investigation of the profound shifts needed — individually and collectively — to champion and adequately invest in older adults’ creativity and cultural agency.

Through facilitated conversations and peer-to-peer exchange, this dynamic and collegial convening connected a worldwide network of colleagues working in diverse communities and sectors to advance creative aging. The Summit was designed for those who develop, deliver, and/or support arts programs by, with, and for older people including professionals from the social and aging services, and the technology, education, cultural, heritage, housing, and health sectors.

Hosted by a different country each year, the 2023 Summit was organized by Lifetime Arts (United States) in collaboration with Creative Ageing Development Agency (CADA) in England and Armas-festival, City of Helsinki, and Koy Kaapelitalo in Finland.

Why Some Doctors Are Prescribing Ballroom Dance or a Day at the Museum

An Excerpt from the Article:

Hashmi had, in effect, written Ruth a social prescription, in which a clinician refers a patient to a community or cultural activity such as an art club, music performance, dance class, volunteer activity, or nature walk in order to bolster their mental and physical health. As chronic health conditions, an aging population, and declining mental health overwhelm the nation, prescription drugs are not the magic bullets they’re sometimes expected to be—and that’s particularly true right now, during a global pandemic and the greatest natural experiment of social isolation in history. Doctors have very few tools to address the social determinants of health. Could social prescribing be part of the solution?

To begin answering that question, social prescribing needs a formal definition. The English might have the best claim to creating it, since their National Health Service (NHS) is the only major health care system that has funded social prescribing nationally. Dr. Michael Dixon, a pioneer of the social prescribing movement in England and chair of the College of Medicine, keeps the parameters broad. “I suppose I define it as anything that the patient and the link worker think will help get them to a better place,” he says.

Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing

From the Website:

The Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing (CISP) is a new national hub to link people and share practices that connect people to community-based supports and services that can help improve their health and wellbeing.