Helpful Village has the pleasure to announce that we are one of the thirteen companies that have been selected to join the Fall 2023 cohort of the AARP AgeTech Collaborative. Leveraging AARP's backing, our companies benefit from consumer insights, expert consultations, growth strategies, and specialized design insights, among other exclusive opportunities. The AARP AgeTech Collaborative mission is to fuel our growth and advance AgeTech innovation. With targeted resources and a specialized ecosystem, AARP is committed to accelerating the success of Helpful Village and the twelve other fantastic companies that joined this AARP program this week. We invite all our Village friends to learn more about the AARP AgeTech Collaborative on their website and to read the AARP announcement of this batch of the program that started this week!
An opportunity bigger than Helpful Village
Our collaboration with AARP started this week and we can finally let you know more about what it means for Helpful Village and for the Village Movement more generally.
While we are honored to be the Tech company that AARP selected for their program, we understand that this conversation is not only about technology. For the duration of the program, we have an opportunity to help AARP understand what Villages are about and we immediately invited the Village to Village Network, Village Movement California, WAVE and all the other Regional Village associations to help us explain AARP how the Village Movement has evolved in recent years and why we all think that AARP should be more supportive of Villages across the country and internationally.
And we say "more supportive" because AARP is already supporting Villages in various ways. AARP is the largest sponsor of the VtV conference, the largest sponsor of the Village Movement California conference, and a sponsor of multiple individual Villages across the country. And we insist in the "more" because we believe AARP should and will become a larger financial supporter in the future!
Now that AARP is collaborating with Helpful Village, we have a unique opportunity to show them what Villages can do combining the great principles of the Village Movement (Aging-in-Place, Neighbors helping Neighbors, Volunteering, Social Connection, etc) and EASY-to-USE technology that can scale the benefits of the Village Movement with the efficiency of modern technology.
We want to open up this conversation to the largest number and be as inclusive as possible. We realize Villages will have many questions about the implication of this AARP AgeTech Collaborative announcement and we want to address all these questions with anyone that cares about Villages. In addition to VtV and all the regional Village associations, we want to welcome the participation of all Village leaders (regardless of the software they use) if they think this conversation about AARP's role in our space is relevant to them.
Helpful Village was one of the finalists of the What’s Next Longevity Venture Summit on June 4-15 2023, where we first met AARP AgeTech Collaborative accelerator program leaders. Following our presentation at this summit, they communitacted to us that they really liked our presentation and that they would like us to consider accepting an invitation to join their program in the Fall. That's how our journey with AARP started!
“We understand the negative health effects of loneliness and isolation that have been shown to be potentially as dangerous as chronic disease. We are committed to finding tech solutions that get ahead of this growing problem.”
Amy Shroads, Director of Startup Programming at the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP.
What's next? How to learn more about this?
The AARP program is quite intense and during our first week we have already done 3 meetings with AARP. The Helpful Village team needs to report weekly progress to our AARP Portfolio Manager and we have a long list of Village Movement questions we need to research. Oftentimes, our company doesn't have the relevant information so we reached out to VTV and the Regional Village Associations asking them to help us figure out some of those answers. In addition to that, we want to welcome any and all feedback we receive from Village leaders across the nation (regardless of the software they use). At Helpful Village we believe an all hands information session with Village leaders and Village associations should be organized ASAP, but in the meantime, everyone is welcome to come talk to us during the National Villages Gathering event that is taking place via Zoom on October 3rd and October 4th.
Helpful Village presentation at the National Villages Gathering 2023 will take place on:
October 4th at 12:00 PM Eastern Time (9AM Pacific)
We hope to see you there, but if you cannot make it to our Zoom presentation during the VTV conference, pease stay tuned as we be reaching out to Villages to help us figure out how to take advantage of this unique opportunity to collaborate with AARP.
Yours truly, Manuel Acevedo Helpful Village CEO
If you are curious about Helpful Village, or if you want to see what we mean by Easy-to-Use Village Management Software, please do not hesitate to visit our website.