Provide community organizations with a template for good physical activity programs.

Identify and review existing home-based and group-based physical activity programs and/or templates.
Identify what a template could look like (e.g. level of complexity, specificity, components, audience segmentation). Develop a template for physical activity programs.
Develop a plan for disseminating and using the template.
Assess template effectiveness.

National Council on the Aging (Lead Organization)

Active Aging Partnership, Fifty-Plus Fitness Association, International Council on Active Aging, National Recreation and Park Association, national voluntary health organizations (Arthritis, Heart Disease), and other organizations.

Organizations would assist in identifying exemplary programs and templates, pooling existing databases, establishing components of the template to be developed, reviewing and responding to drafts of the template, assisting in disseminating the template, and providing staff support.

Project leadership.
Modest funding and assistance for production and dissemination of the template.

Need input from users.
Keep the template simple and understandable.
Template should be sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of a variety of users.
Leadership is needed from both "aging" and "physical activity" organizations.

NCOA has completed a Best Practices in Physical Activity Programming for Older Adults competition. This effort has resulted in a wealth of information regarding the development and maintenance of successful physical activity programs. NCOA is working with the University of Illinois at Chicago to analyze these data and extract essential program components that could be part of the template. As this work progresses, NCOA will work with other Blueprint partners to finalize the template.

The NCOA pilot project on falls prevention focused on risk identification and intervention. An original intervention from Yale University was modified to fit the programming for senior and day service centers. A summary article and translation of academic programming to community-based organizations appeared in Innovations.

The International Council on Active Aging and Life Fitness have created an online resource to educate the industry about how to design attractive and space-efficient wellness environments that motivate older adults to exercise. www.icaa.cc

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