Tennessee: Creative Aging Tennessee

Creative Aging Tennessee is an initiative to improve older adults’ health and well-being through the arts. By leveraging resources from an unusual partnership of three state agencies—the Tennessee Arts Commission (TAC), the Tennessee Department of Health and the Tennessee Commission on Aging and Disability—the program helps address the needs of Tennessee’s growing population of residents aged 60 and over. Creative Aging Tennessee provides opportunities to older adults that increase their engagement with the arts and that achieve outcomes such as improved health and wellness, lifelong learning and engagement, positive perceptions about aging, and better connections between older residents and their communities. The program offers grants of up to $5,000 to fund creative aging projects and also showcases existing efforts enabling older residents to participate in the arts. TAC developed the program with community input gleaned from the Creativity Connects Roundtable discussions sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and in collaboration with the National Center for Creative Aging. To learn more, contact TAC Director of Arts Access Kim Johnson or read about the program’s first set of grantees, who collectively received 19 awards totaling more than $75,000.