Infrastructure for Aging Services

Infrastructure for Aging Services

With the St. Louis City Senior Fund and Marillac Mission Fund / 4 months

In 2025, aging services providers were facing potentially-catastrophic impacts to their budgets and the needs of their clients due to federal and state cuts and policy changes. To rapidly plan for and respond to these changes, the St. Louis City Senior Fund and Marillac Mission Fund supported a co-design effort to identify strategic opportunities to strengthen the aging services network and maintain critical services for older adults.

Public Design Bureau partnered with these two funders to design and lead a collaborative process for identifying specific ideas to support the network, and testing those ideas with a wide range of stakeholders.

Process + Outputs

Facilitated a Design Team made up of service providers, funders, and experts in the space who together set the direction and intention for the process. The Design Team met 9 times within the 4 month project, sharing their stories and experiences, reviewing input from others, and shaping the final recommendations.
Hosted three rounds of open house sessions to hear from providers, funders, board members, and other stakeholders. These sessions were designed to seek valuable input while also connecting providers to each other and strengthening the network through relationship building.
Tested ideas through targeted interviews and gathered case studies to understand how implementation of ideas might work, and to build buy-in across the community.
Created action-oriented recommendations, with clear short- and long-term pilots. In parallel, the Senior Fund team developed recommendations for their board to initially support a few of the specific ideas, spurring progress within one week of the completion of the report. See the report and executive summary at the bottom of this page, under Public Design Bureau. (2025). Infrastructure for Aging Services.

The outcomes of this process helped us be specific about what we needed and what it would look like to move forward, and that was empowering.

Nicole Brueggeman at the St. Louis City Senior Fund