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Spring 2004 Our Guest Editor
Advocacy has been a hallmark of progress in the field of aging in the United States. Since the 1930s, champions of older people have pressed to make their lives better, from demonstrations at town meetings to the realms of policy formulation at the state and national level, to everyday interventions in nursing homes and community-care settings. But where are the advocates now? Who will push and pull us to address the challenges of an aging society in the twenty-first century? This issue's guest editor, Richard Browdie, has worked for thirty years for the good of older people through management of government and community care organizations. From 1995 to 2002, he served as secretary of aging for the State of Pennsylvania, and he previously was executive director of the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. Currently he is president and ceo of the Benjamin Rose Institute. "I've been an advocate and I've seen it from all sides," says Browdie. "The days of Claude Pepper are gone; we're not producing effective, pragmatic advocates. It seems many have either aged out or sold out-and things are more complicated now." As so often happens, Browdie's own interest in aging began "serendipitously." Just out of college in sociology, he got a job as a caseworker in a rural emergency food and medicine program, and ended up developing a food delivery system for the community's elders. "I became the agency's unofficial 'gerontologist.' I realized I wanted to help older people, and the way that appealed to me was to make the system better." Browdie has been doing that ever since. As Pennsylvania's secretary of aging, he fostered collaboration with the service organizations across the state, and during his tenure, the Department of Aging's network of assistance to families caring for older relatives and friends, transportation, dementia programs, adult daycare, case management, and home and community-based services grew substantially in breadth and depth. He also negotiated expansion of the state's pharmaceutical assistance program for elders, the largest in the nation. As for the current state of aging policy, Browdie says, he is not at one pole or the other. "I think that on balance, older people are being served better today than they were twenty years ago; progress has been made," he says. "But at the same time, as a society, we are aging rapidly, and we steadfastly refuse to prepare or come up with a rational policy for dealing with this. It's alarming. "The tenor of the times is very nasty-very political, and there is a misunderstanding of what advocacy in the past has accomplished. Most advocacy in the past has been bipartisan. Sound knowledge, flexibility, and preparation are the essentials. These days it's harder and harder to get the public's attention. As a culture, we are phobic about aging. The dialog has got to produce something the public will vote for. "There's got to be an American way to produce reasonable retirement, healthcare, and long-term-care security. Where are the advocates who will foster this, and what can they do? That's what this issue of Generations is about."
-Mary Johnson
From Generations Spring 2004 issue, 28(1): 4. © 2004 American Society on Aging
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