COMMUNITY RESOURCES
Dementia Friendly Toolkit
ACT on Alzheimer's® Dementia Friendly Community Toolkit provides tools and resources to guide communities in adopting dementia-friendly practices. The toolkit is divided into four phases: Convene, Assess, Analyze and ACT Together.
Communities are invited to use and adapt these materials for their own use. Please cite ACT on Alzheimer's in your materials.
What's a Dementia Friendly Community?
A dementia friendly community engages every sector of the community in ensuring that people living with dementia and their care partners have access to the services they need, are treated with dignity and have opportunities to contribute.
The ACT on Alzheimer's® Dementia Friendly Community Toolkit helps your community become dementia friendly — a community that is informed, safe, and respectful of people living with dementia and their families, has supportive features across all community sectors and fosters quality of life for everyone.
This short videos helps you know how to get started.
This report from the Alzheimer's Association explores the barriers that people living with dementia and their carers face in their community, how they would like to be engaged with their local area and the support they need to do so. It also collates existing evidence and describes projects that are already making a difference for people with dementia. This information is used both to provide a definition of a dementia-friendly community, and to lay out 10 areas of focus for communities working to become dementia friendly.
Dementia Friendly America (DFA) offers this guide to help communities in the United States evaluate the impact of their work. For this reason, the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, which administers both Dementia Friendly America and Dementia Friends USA, is incredibly grateful to AARP’s Office of Policy and Brain Health and AARP International for funding the development of this important new tool, the Dementia-Friendly Community Evaluation Guide.
Would you like to learn from the experience of others?
More than 60 communities have used the Dementia Friendly Tookit in their communities and have completed evaluations. We are happy to make them avaliable to you upon request.
The Dementia-Friendly Communities Toolkit is informed by research and is flexible and adaptable to a community’s needs. The University of Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality was a key resources for creating the toolkit and continues to be a valuable source for information and support.
The ACT on Alzheimer's® Dementia Friendly Communities Toolkit, provider practice tools, dementia training, and related resources may be reproduced, adapted, or both when these restrictions are followed:
- Acknowledgment of ACT on Alzheimer's must appear in print and online. Use this citation: Reproduced (or Adapted) from ACT on Alzheimer's® developed tools and resources.
- ACT on Alzheimer's® developed tools and resources cannot be sold in their original form or in a modified/adapted form.
