Contents

Mission

Ibasho partners with local organizations and communities to design and create socially integrated and sustainable communities that value their elders. We create a place where elders find the opportunities to contribute to their community members of all ages.

Our Core Values are

  • Elders as assets
  • Multi-generational community life
  • Local participation and control
  • Design based on elders’ needs and cultural values
  • Design guided by elders’ stories and wisdom
  • Evidence based practices
  • Global perspective to exchange knowledge and replicate what works

Our Goals

  • Reinforce the value of aging
  • Promote the value of socially integrating elders within the wider community
  • Demonstrate multi-generational social, economic, and environmental benefits
  • Facilitate shared learning and replicate model between the developed and developing worlds

The Ibasho Approach

The Ibasho approach has five key components.

  1. Elders’ leadership
    Ensuring that elders develop their leadership skills is important both to help boost their visibility and self-esteem and to ensure that the project is well managed and sustainable.
  2. Process
    Providing a way to draw on elders’ knowledge and experience makes the community stronger—and more resilient in the event of a natural disaster.
  3. Place
    Creating a community hub allows for encounters to occur that build social capital both for individuals and for the community as a whole.
  4. Activities
    Implementing and managing an Ibasho project empowers elders, giving them a way to be useful and relevant members of the community, and the activities they provide enrich the community members who visit the project.

  5. Ibasho’s Eight principles.

    6. Ensuring the Ibasho’s core principles are embraced throughout the four components listed above: Elder Leadership, Process, Place, and Activities, so that elders’ potential provides a way to improve a community’s physical and social infrastructures.

Neighborhood outreach

To ensure that each project is truly and elder-led and -owned initiative, elders are in charge of reaching out to other stakeholders and community members in developing the Ibasho project. It is also important that the place designed strengthens the community by serving people of all ages.