Dear Colleagues,

I'm incredibly proud of the ways Policy, Research and International (PRI) delivered for AARP in 2021 through our research insights, mission-critical policy development, timely and credible policy solutions, strategic global engagement, and overall thought leadership. Our team supported AARP's 2021-2023 Strategic Plan—or our “Plan to Win”—through the leadership of seven enterprise issue areas, with 24 PRI staff members serving as strategy or tactic leads, and an AARP Research liaison integrated into each issue area or organizational priority. Throughout the constantly shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic, our more than 130 team members excelled in meeting AARP's mission to empower people to choose how they live as they age. These contributions in service to AARP and its mission are evident in this 2021 Impact Report.

I invite you to explore the many ways PRI's work funnels into the efforts of the broader enterprise. We met AARP's unrivaled expectations to confront the challenges of responding to a real-time public health crisis in its second year. We tackled prominent societal issues exacerbated by the pandemic, including focusing attention on vulnerable nursing home residents through regular updates to and analysis from the AARP Nursing Home Dashboard. Leveraged by colleagues in the Community, State and National Affairs Group (CSN) and Integrated Communications and Marketing (ICM), the Dashboard brought attention to the consequential problems unfolding in nursing homes. Moreover, our work informed and initiated essential conversations on topics that had pandemic implications yet also transcended it. These included making longevity accessible for all, supporting brain health and reducing isolation, as well as exploring vaccine hesitancy, labor force participation, food insecurity, and economic issues.

PRI's leadership, voice, and durability are embodied in the projects we pursued. Our industry tools, like BankSafe's training program to identify and stop financial exploitation, continued to make a striking impact in support of the enterprise Savings and Planning issue area. We embraced new ways to tell our stories and forged collaborations (internal and external) that drove action. In releasing Representing Identity: A PRI Guide, we followed our commitment to ensuring PRI's research and publications are consistently and meaningfully inclusive and representative.

We helped AARP take a leadership role in evolving the global discourse on longevity to become one on healthy longevity. Specifically, our October 2021 global conversation on aging and longevity defined the topic to include economic growth, work beyond traditional retirement age, and compelling practices for holistic healthy aging around the world.

PRI's departments joined others to produce timely and trusted evidence-based content that we hope will reverberate for years to come. PRI experts partnered with CSN to inform top legislative priorities, including the infrastructure bill, enacted in late 2021, and the ongoing efforts to pass the Build Back Better legislation that incorporated the need to reduce drug prices. We provided the policy foundation for informing AARP advocacy positions, external partnerships, products and services, and communications. These included not only supporting the enterprise strategy to improve affordability of prescription drugs, but also a successful nine-state pilot to educate adults 50-64 about financial assistance and enrollment in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

We released new insights from our Longevity Economy Outlook®, looking at how supports for family caregivers could boost the economy. Through the enterprise-wide housing strategy, we forged a groundbreaking relationship with the Lowe's Livable Home initiative, placing a spotlight on age-friendly design in the home.

The list of prominent collaborations continues from there. In teaming up with the World Economic Forum, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and 50 employers, we continued to build the Living, Learning, and Earning Longer Collaborative and our Growing with Age platform, which was recognized in 2021 as a Fast Company World Changing Idea. We also collaborated with the Work and Jobs enterprise issue team to release The Future of Work for the 50+, which highlights five megatrends to consider. And working with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, we co-developed the Foresight 50+ panel, the first commercially available high-quality consumer panel focused on the 50-plus population and an important tool to drive decision making across the enterprise.

And we did all this while implementing innovative and new ways of communicating, including through more visual storytelling in social media, videos, and publications.

My hope is that as we reflect on PRI's 2021 impact, we ask some critical questions: How can we harness our recent efforts to inform our future actions? What new collaborations can help us drive the key dialogues and policy changes to fuel lasting progress and ensure older adults live long, meaningful lives?

To our colleagues from across AARP, I want to emphasize how eager we are to continue our partnership in making AARP's Plan to Win a success and solving the important and emerging challenges of the future.

Debra B. Whitman, PhD
Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer