State aging and disability leaders, self-advocates, and national partners gathered at the American Association of People with Disabilities headquarters in Washington, DC, on August 20–21 for the annual National Community of Practice (CoP) meeting of NACDD’s Bridging Aging & Disability Networks (BADN) initiative. Nearly 50 participants from 15 state teams — Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas — joined colleagues from the Administration for Community Living, USAging, Brandeis University’s Lurie Institute on Disability Policy, the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and NACDD.
This year’s theme, Built to Last: Sustaining and Scaling the Bridge Between Aging and Disability Networks, picked up where last year’s “doing more with less” conversation left off. Five years in, the CoP has built a robust body of work, including documented promising practices, new tools, and durable state partnerships. The meeting was designed to convert that work into staying power at the local, state, and regional levels.
The design was deliberately participatory, maximizing the gift of having so many state leaders and stakeholders in the same space and ensuring lots of interactive dialogue to promote shared learning and candid conversations. The opening plenary, Holding the Bridge, moved participants from individual reflection to cross-state pairs to regional clusters, surfacing each region’s most promising strategy and biggest threat amid ongoing state policy and budget pressures affecting HCBS for aging adults with IDD and their family caregivers.
Six action-oriented breakouts followed a shared model [Frame, Share, Reflect, Focus, Elevate, Commit] and spanned a variety of core areas of emphasis for BADN states, including: enabling technology and AI; communications and messaging; caregiving capacity and workforce; aligned case management and service coordination; supported decision-making; and measuring impact. Each produced a problem statement, cross-state learnings, and recommendations for both peer states and federal partners.
Kelly Israel (Interim Director of “Not Dead Yet” and a consultant to NACDD) and the New York BADN team also previewed a state-specific planning guide on healthy aging for self-advocates, and Dr. Joe Caldwell of Brandeis University introduced three new promising practices briefs in production.
Day two opened with a peer consultancy, in which each state put a real, current challenge on the table for rapid-fire consultation from peers. The meeting closed with a dialogue with Dr. Rebecca Hines, Commissioner of the Administration on Disabilities, where the network reported out first its learnings and recommendations from the Day 1 breakout sessions and then the Commissioner responded.
Recommendations included joint ACL–CMS guidance on technology access, adoption of a standard occupational code for direct support professionals, stronger investment in the “D” in Aging and Disability Resource Centers, and a national aging & disability bridging strategy modeled on the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers.
Teams left with one concrete commitment each for the next 90 days — and a shared conviction that the bridge they have built is worth holding.
