Advocacy
2022: A Year in Review!
By Maddy Bynes, Special to Never Too Late
is a primer for our community plan completed every four years. The community needs assessment consisted of three major parts: a community survey, focus groups for aging service providers, and listening sessions throughout the community. Pima County residents were able to engage in this process either virtually or in person and the survey and listening sessions were offered with both Spanish and ASL interpretation available. Throughout the beginning of 2023, we will be compiling these data and analyzing them to inform how we deliver services moving into our new planning period. We’ve had a busy year here at PCOA and so have you! We couldn’t have done such amazing advocacy work without your generous support and assistance. We continue to be impressed and humbled that our calls for action are always met with such robust turnout. It is because of you that we are making the lives of older adults in our community better. For 2023, we hope you’ll join us for advocating for policies that enhance the quality of life and care for older adults and their care partners by visiting advocate.pcoa.org.
At the same time, we launched our 2022 legislative strategy to get additional funding into the home and community-based services system. Throughout the session, we partnered with champions like Representatives Alma Hernandez and Regina Cobb and Senators Lela Alston and David Gowan to move forward efforts to inject more funding into the Older Americans Act services system. With your help in contacting your legislators, we were able to have the most successful legislative year yet! Area Agencies on Aging statewide received $1 million of on-going funding to address a continuing challenge in providing equitable provider rates for home and community-based service providers, as well as $2 million in one-time funding for the same purpose. These funds help PCOA, and our partners throughout the state, in providing competitive service rates and serving more older adults efficiently. This marks the second year in a row that the legislature has invested funds into the home and community-based services system under the Older Americans Act. We will need your help to continue these efforts in 2023, focusing primarily on retaining the $2 million in one-time funding for the Area Agencies on Aging. We also launched our community needs assessment in the fall, which
With 2023 right around the corner, it’s important we reflect on the work we’ve done and how we can move forward together into the new year. 2022 has been chalk full of changes for our community and at PCOA, marking the year where we moved into a post- pandemic reality. In the beginning of 2022, we worked hard together to recognize the importance of getting vaccinated and boosted against both COVID-19 and the flu. At the beginning of the year, COVID cases continued to surge and so we poured our time and efforts into grassroots campaigns geared at getting people the most up to date information about the COVID-19 vaccine. In May, we launched our final phase of our Take YOUR Shot campaign to get the word out about the COVID-19 vaccine and in July we won first place in the USAging Aging and Innovation Awards for the effort. As we move towards 2023, it’s important to recognize that both COVID-19 and the flu remain a threat to older adults. Make sure you’re up to date on all of your boosters and that you’ve received this year’s flu shot. Visit covid19.pcoa.org for more information about how to get vaccinated.
December 2022, Never Too Late | Page 25
Pima Council on Aging
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