Livable Orlando: An Age-Friendly Initiative Action Plan 2022 – 2025
Livable Orlando: An Age-Friendly Initiative Action Plan 2022 – 2025
Award of Excellence
2023 APA Florida Project Award - Innovation in Planning for All Ages
About the project
The City of Orlando is proud to submit our Livable Orlando: An Age-Friendly Initiative Action Plan 2022-2025 (“Livable Orlando”) for consideration in the APA FL 2023 Project Award category of Innovation in Planning for All Ages. Livable Orlando was developed under the auspices of the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities and the World Health Organization. The planning process was led by Mayor Buddy Dyer’s Committee on Livability & Healthy Aging, a committed group of volunteers representing key senior services organizations, community partners, and local resident advocates. The committee was charged with developing strategies to create a more age-friendly community based on eight domains of livability that address the built environment and the social environment. Livable Orlando was written in-house by Orlando City Planning staff.
The Livable Orlando Age-Friendly Action Plan outlines 25 goals and 89 action items to improve mobility and safety, enhance employment and volunteer opportunities, reduce social isolation, and improve health and longevity, all to transform the way our community thinks about aging. The overall goal of our Action Plan is to make Orlando a place to live better for longer, and for our city to be more accessible for everyone. A unique highlight of our Action Plan is the AARP Community Challenge Grant “Tables of Connection” project which led to the installation of solar-operated tables and shade structures in two neighborhood parks, increasing internet access in two underserved neighborhoods while integrating art and place-making.
Livable Orlando was created following an in-depth community-wide livability survey and extensive 2-year public engagement process made more challenging by the Covid-19 pandemic, with the Orlando City Council ultimately approving the Action Plan on September 12, 2022. One of the unique elements of our community engagement process was a poetry contest with the theme of “Words and Wisdom” – those poems were fully integrated into the plan document, along with artwork created by Arts the Spark participants (a program offered by the Orlando Museum of Art for those living with memory or neurological impairments such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease), as chapter dividers and in full in the appendix to the plan. Arts and culture are fully integrated throughout the plan document as incredibly important in creating a livable community.
Livable Orlando is a critical component of Orlando’s comprehensive planning efforts and will be fully integrated into other plans and processes and vice versa including the Growth Management Plan, Future-Ready City Master Plan, Green Works Community Action Plan (Sustainability & Resiliency), and the Vision Zero Action plan among others. These plans serve to re-enforce and reflect each other where there is synergy. We believe that local governments should align their planning processes, programming, and implementation efforts with equity and inclusion in mind, all through an age-friendly lens. We believe that our Action Plan can provide a model for other cities and counties as they strive to make their communities more age-friendly.