“Growing for the Future”

Welcome! This area has been set up by the Senior Center as a way of communicating with our members, participants and the Rochester/Olmsted County community about our "Growing for the Future" project. (See the next posting for what Growing for the Future is all about.)

Feel free to respond with your questions and comments about our mission, plans and progress. We expect that everyone will do so in a respectful and adult manner. If not, we have given the blog administrator the authority not to publish the comments.

In order to leave a comment you will have to sign up for a free blog account through Google.

We look forward to hearing from you; what your ideas are and your reaction to our direction.

“Growing for the Future” is a community call to action that is being raised to assure that seniors have the opportunity and support to age well and be successfully independent. The Rochester Senior Center is leading this charge by developing partnerships and working together with others to provide programs, recreation and services which encourage active, healthy and independent lifestyles for people 50 years of age and greater. The accomplishment of this will result in our Rochester/Olmsted community becoming a world-class place to “grow old”.

The Rochester Senior Center is one of our community’s strongest advocates for healthy aging. As our community grows older we want to “engage” older adults, develop their assets, and improve our community at the same time.

This mission, direction and campaign is being called “Growing for the Future”. It is a campaign to inform and educate the public of the current and upcoming needs of the senior population, recruit partners who feel the same way, prepare and research the needed programs, activities, volunteers and staff for the upcoming baby boomer wave into the senior population, and to insure that we have the facilities and programs to accommodate current and future needs.

Independent research consultants, local community leaders and our own members have recommended that we begin the planning necessary to provide for needed services to our community into the future. Local and national demographics indicate a large influx of new seniors will be coming into this age-group very soon as the ‘baby boomers’ continue to age. The "Growing for the Future" campaign responds to this trend. It began with research and is now being put into action.

One of the first steps is to gather information and ideas to help develop a more detailed plan to go forward. Specific questions we need to answer seem to funnel into four broad areas. These include...

1) What NEW services and facilities will be needed/expected in the future?

2) Where can we locate our facility to obtain the necessary space to provide our current services to a larger membership AND provide new services to the upcoming ‘baby boomers’? Or can we stay where we are and expand?

3) Our concept of creating a "Community Center” that focuses on serving the needs of seniors, as well as the needs of the community, will ensure the new facility is utilized to the fullest. What other community programs, services and facilities are needed?

4) Following the ideas proven to be successful in other communities, how can we work more closely with other service providers and organizations in Olmsted County to ensure our growth plans assist other service organizations? And what are these organizations?

We welcome your comments to this and the following posts so that we don't overlook any needs or opportunities.

Labels: planning

Our independent research, staff and current members have created a list of items that should be planned for as we go forward. Our intent is to provide services needed by our current and future seniors and to NOT try to compete with any other service organizations. Also, a facility (and programs) that can provide needed services to seniors and can also be used by the community is of most interest.

We welcome your comments to this post so that we don't overlook any programming opportunities.

Labels: services

We anticipate the need for a facility with a minimum of twice the floor space that we currently have. We already have a list of 20 locations which we have been researching and ranking of those sites is being based upon how the locations meet our anticipated needs. Yes, expanding our current facility and parking areas are on this list.

We welcome your comments to this post so that we don't overlook any opportunities.

Labels: location