Articles
The Journal on Active Aging brings articles of value to professionals dedicated to older-adult quality of life. Content sweeps across the active-aging landscape to focus on education and practice. Find articles of interest by searching the article archives in three ways: Enter a keyword in the articles search bar; click on search by topic; or type a keyword or phrase in the general search bar at the top of the page.
Topic- Culture Change
Taking culture change and mission beyond our walls by Kelly A. Stranburg, MEd, EP-C, CSCS
How do we cultivate a culture and integrate it throughout an organization to support vitality and well-being for older adults? At Sharon Towers in Charlotte, North Carolina, we set out on an extensive culture-change journey nearly two years ago, sharing our experiences with Journal on Active Aging readers throughout 2016. The culture-change process, as we discovered, takes time, collaboration, and being open to obstacles. Among the other things we've learned, there are many ways to impart our organization's goal and mission, both internally and externally. Today, our culture-change journey is impacting an operational requirement and thus community outreach to aid many older adults in aging well.
moreCulture Change
"Living well" flourishes with NuStep's Pinnacle Award winners
An active faith inspires the desire to serve others and contribute to the quality of their lives. The question for the individual or organization is how to do so. For two faith-based recipients of the 2017 NuStep Pinnacle Award, the answer lies in providing services that meet the needs of older adults and support whole-person wellness.
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"Are we there yet?" Measuring progress and success by Kelly A. Stranburg, MEd, CEP, CSCS
In my last Journal on Active Aging article, we reviewed the value of and potential strategies for communicating the message of culture change. Part of telling your story and communicating your culture-change journey is being able to identify goals, measure progress and celebrate achievements. But how do you even measure something as broad and challenging as the culture change of an organization? How do you know when you’ve reached the end of this journey? That you've succeeded? That you've achieved what you set out to do?
moreCulture Change
Communication: The key to building support for culture change by Kelly A. Stranburg, MEd, CEP, CSCS
In my last Journal on Active Aging article, I discussed how we divided into work groups and conquered nearly 200 ideas to thoroughly develop a strategy for creating change at Sharon Towers in Charlotte, North Carolina. Communication is the challenge I’ll address in this article. Let me first stress how imperative it is to communicate the why behind change and impending strategy when starting out on a culture-change journey.
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Creating strategy out of ideas by Kelly A. Stranburg, MEd, CEP, CSCS
At Sharon Towers, our nonprofit life-plan community in Charlotte, North Carolina., we are beginning to create our strategy for changing our culture. We have a task force of more than 60 individuals working on the initiative. We have created a vision statement. And we have brainstormed so many ideas of what we would like to see happen next that my office looks like one giant post-it note. Now is the time to take all these wonderful ideas and analyze, discuss and plot them. It’s a lot to discuss and figure out when the task force generated almost 200 ideas. How can a group of some 60-plus individuals tackle so many different ideas while still keeping a sense of urgency, commitment and passion? We divide and conquer.
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Friend or foe? Dealing with time by Kelly A. Stranburg, MEd, CEP, CSCS
In my last article, we learned about the power of brainstorming. Constant brainstorming has not only enabled us to generate direction for the culture-change journey at Sharon Towers, our not-for-profit continuing care retirement community in Charlotte, North Carolina, but also shown us how best to redirect ourselves when necessary. Additionally, brainstorming has allowed us to create a voice for and buy-in from team members and residents involved with this movement. My previous article addressed one of the greatest challenges of culture change as well. Time.
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