AARP Foundation

Our Mission
AARP Foundation serves vulnerable people 50 and older by creating and advancing effective solutions that help them secure the essentials.

Our Focus
We're tackling senior poverty by sparking bold, innovative solutions that help vulnerable older adults build economic opportunity and social connectedness — fostering resilience, strengthening communities and restoring hope.

Our History
For 57 years, we've aided America's poor and isolated seniors. As AARP's charitable affiliate, we serve AARP members and nonmembers alike.

Our Approach
Operating at the intersection of collaboration, innovation, legal advocacy and grantmaking, we bring together industry, government, activists, and volunteers to forge practical approaches that pair brainpower with some serious willpower.

AARP Foundation has a range of internal resources to support our work. Each of the program areas is staffed with a complement of employees who bring the skill and expertise to drive the work forward. These include subject matter experts as well as general practitioners capable of moving projects forward. Budget is allocated to each program unit in alignment with the breadth and scope of planned work.

Shared services provide support to all of the program areas. These include marketing and communications, technology, program evaluation, strategic planning, innovation, and development. Additionally, AARP Foundation Litigation conducts litigation to protect the rights of vulnerable older Americans across all of our issues areas.

As the charitable affiliate of AARP, we benefit from the strength of AARP's advocacy arm and the influence of its 37 million members.
External resources include partnerships, influence, and the ability to convene disparate stakeholders.

Food Security – For food security, we have improved the food security of over 10,000 low-income 50+ people and are moving toward our goal of 50,000. We achieved our interim milestone of creating 10 strategic partnerships. We have not yet met our outcome of reducing the negative health outcomes of 5% of the people we served. Due to the nature of our programs, it has been difficult to track the health outcomes that can be attributed to our work. We have refined our strategies to focus on the methodology to measure. We have also narrowed our objectives to the people we serve rather than setting a goal for the population at large.

Housing Security – For housing security, we have not yet met any of the outcomes. We are making progress toward increasing the number of low-income 50+ in affordable and adequate housing by 10,000 by 2017. We have achieved our milestones of establishing 5 new strategic partnerships and are on track for 9 new concepts by 2017. Since much of the housing work exists outside of our control, we are looking at strategies for legislative advocacy that will help stimulate the production and protection of affordable housing.

Income Security – For income security, we are on track to reach 6,000 people securing or advancing in jobs each year. We have not yet met our outcome of 300,000 avoiding predatory practices each year. We learned that it is hard to measure the incidence or avoidance of fraud since fraud victims often do not report. We have adjusted the strategy to include partnering with financial institutions that are also invested in the reduction of fraud. We are on track to reach our partnership milestone and have met our milestone of developing 5 new concepts.

Social Connectedness – We have not yet met any of the outcomes for social connectedness. However, we are on track with the milestones that would get us there. First, we have established an isolation assessment tool that allows us to measure the degree of isolation among the people we served. The tool has been externally validated. We are now able to roll it out among the people we serve. Additionally, we are narrowing down the health outcomes that will be tracked to measure the reduction in targeted negative health outcomes.