Click on these links to connect to websites, organizations, articles and other resources in the following areas:
Creative Aging
The emerging field of creative aging focuses on the positive and powerful role of the arts in enhancing the quality of life for older adults. Instead of viewing aging as a period of decline, the proponents of creative aging recognize growing older as a time of life with abundant but untapped potential for personal growth and enhanced well-being.
Current research shows that professionally conducted arts programs that engage elders in active learning can have positive mental and physical health benefits. Most important, arts programs that create working/learning relationships with other elders, students, family members and the community often succeed in breaking down the chronic isolation and inertia that inhibit many older adults.
- The Impact of Professionally Conducted Cultural Programs on Older Adults By Gene Cohen, Center on Aging Health and Humanities at George Washington University (2006) Executive Summary
- Creativity Matters: The Arts and Aging Toolkit by Johanna Misey Boyer, National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts (2007)
- Creativity Matters: Arts and Aging in America By Gay Hanna and Susan Perlstein, Monograph, Americans for the Arts (2008)
- AARP Lifelong Learning
- Arts for the Aging
- Burbank Senior Artists Colony
- Elders Share the Arts
- ELDR
- Encore Creativity for Older Adults
- National Center for Creative Aging
- National Endowment for the Arts
- National Guild for Community Arts Education
- New Horizons Intl. Music
- Senior Theatre Resource Center
- Society for Creative Aging
- Young @ Heart Chorus
Arts & Livable Communities
ARTS & CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS play positive and powerful roles in enhancing the quality of life for older Americans and are key to building livable communities for all ages. Libraries, museums, theaters, historical societies, community dance, theater and music schools, and botanic gardens provide programs and services that build new opportunities for economic vitality, engaged learning and human expression while naturally breaking down economic, racial and age barriers. CULTURE BUILDS COMMUNITY.
- Arts as an Industry: Their Economic Impact on New York City and New York State
- Americans for the Arts
- Partners for Livable Communities
- Generations United
- Alliance for the Arts (NY State Arts Organizations)
- NY Main Street Program
- Ford Foundation, Supporting Diverse Art Spaces
- National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts (member directory)
- New Horizons Intl. Music (member orchestras)

