Annual Report Foundation 2009

Meanwhile, the number of unemployed workers age 55 to 64 has nearly tripled in the last two years. Thanks to AARP Foundation’s WorkSearch program, more than 32,000 mature adults received assistance with skills assessments, job openings and more in 2009. WorkSearch greatly benefited from the generous support of both Microsoft, which gave $100,000 to help expand its services in Seattle and New York City, and Denver’s Rose Community Foundation, which provided a $10,000 Boomers Leading Change grant to WorkSearch.

Helping People Who Help Others

Each year, more than one of every five adults provides unpaid care to older adults or disabled family members. Most of these caregivers (60 percent) work full-time. AARP Foundation has several initiatives to help caretakers, their families and their employers -- all made possible with help from these corporate and foundation donors.

• Harrah’s Foundation provided a $1.1 million grant for Meeting America’s Caregiving Challenge, a comprehensive community-based strategy to help current and former caregivers fulfill their responsibilities while continuing to build their own long-term financial security.

• The John A. Hartford Foundation provided a $698,364 grant to support the second phase of Professional Partners Supporting Family Caregiving, which helps nurses and social workers meet the needs of family caregivers.

• New York Life Foundation donated $319,000 to support Integrated Kinship Caregiving in the state of New York. Thanks to this grant, AARP’s New York state office provided advanced training to professionals who work with children and the older relatives, usually grandparents, who are raising them.

Helping People Meet Basic Needs

On April 14, 2009, an AARP/Walgreens Wellness Tour Bus began a two-year tour across the U.S. By the time the bus comes to a final stop, it will have visited more than 3,000 cities, providing more than 2. 5 million people, mostly in underserved communities, access to free health screenings and the opportunity to take part in the Foundation’s Benefits QuickLINK (BQL) program. BQL helps

low-income older people find out if they may qualify for federal, state and local assistance to help them cover the costs of food, prescription drugs, housing, utilities and other essential needs.

Promoting, Protecting and Preserving Assets

AARP Foundation’s Tax-Aide Program provided income tax preparation services to nearly 3 million low- and moderate-income Americans who received free, one-on-one assistance from a small army of 34,600 dedicated volunteers. The AARP Foundation is very grateful to New York Life Foundation, whose $300,000 grant helped Tax-Aide create a user-friendly, Web-based volunteer recruitment tool that helped raise the program’s volunteer retention rates and satisfaction levels even higher.

Our Western Union and MoneyGram Consumer Fraud Prevention Projects use fire to fight fire. Since 2006, our volunteers have telephoned more than 2 million people to warn them against giving money or personal information to scammers who may call asking for this information. Even better, the volunteers give them the tools to fight back and report the callers to the police. In 2009, thanks to $367,000 in multiple Campaign for Wise and Safe Investing grants from Investor Protection Trust, investor education efforts were undertaken statewide in Alaska, Arkansas, Maine, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The quality of long-term care services provided in the United States ranges from the sublime to the atrocious. Thus we are very grateful to the Commonwealth Fund and the SCAN Foundation for supporting our study about feasibility of a state-by-state scorecard to help consumers rank long-term care services. These grants also supported our consensus-building efforts to determine what a high-performing long-term care system would look like. Each organization contributed $87,640, with SCAN supplying an additional $7,600, allowing us to begin work a month earlier.