Annual Report Foundation 2010

The Everyday Essentials: Food, Housing, Income and Personal Connections When the Foundation and AARP announced Drive to End Hunger in the fall of 2010, UnitedHealthCareServices, Inc. and Chase Credit Card Services became the campaign’s first corporate sponsors. Their support is helping to increase awareness and identify long-term solutions for the issue of hunger among older Americans.

Scholarships and Jobs Older women are twice as likely as older men to live in poverty. Helping women who are 40+ get the training they need to find meaningful work with decent retirement benefits is one way to change that statistic.

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Increasing Access to Public Benefits Nearly 40 percent of seniors live on less than $21,000 per year, and many face a daily, impossible choice between buying food and paying their utility bills.

With help from a generous grant from the Walmart Foundation, 460 women in 41 states and the District of Columbia have received AARP Foundation Women’s Scholarships since 2008. In 2010, 3,639 women applied for the Foundation’s Women’s Scholarship, a 40 percent increase over 2009.

With help from Caesars Foundation, AARP Foundation enhanced Benefits QuickLink, our web-based benefits screening tool. Benefits QuickLink provides a link to available benefits by state, allowing older people, their families and caregivers to learn what benefits they may qualify for and how to apply for them quickly and confidentially.

AARP Foundation’s WorkSearch, for
low- to-moderate income job-seekers
age 40+, is another program aimed at
maximizing lifetime earning poten-
tial, helping clients assess their skills,
identify any barriers to success, and
find work. In 2010, WorkSearch helped
almost 53,000 older job seekers, thanks
to help from:
Benefits QuickLink screenings are
also conducted by hundreds of volun-
teers and administered on the AARP/
Walgreens Wellness Tour Bus, now in its
second year. In fact, 73 percent of those
who used the online screening tool in
2010 qualified for at least one benefit.

Microsoft, along with the AARP Foundation, identified a nationally rep-licable “workforce institute” model for delivering large scale, technology-based employment and training services that assist older workers in getting digital, workplace and navigation skills. The grant also enrolled 1,282 low-income workers in Seattle and New York in a stepped-up version of WorkSearch involving community groups and employers; more than 7,000 others benefited from the project’s curricula and e-systems.