Welcome to RRF Foundation for Aging

A Renewed Focus on Our Strategic Plan

For 2026-2030, RRF Foundation for Aging has five priority areas at the core of our grantmaking:

• Age Equity: Reducing ageism toward older adults and challenging age bias.
• Caregiving: Ensuring that care partners for older people are recognized and supported through system-level approaches.
• Economic Security: Valuing the dignity of older people through efforts that ensure and protect their economic security and well-being.
• Housing: Promoting efforts that make housing affordable and enable older people to remain living in the community safely and with dignity.
• Social Connection: Reducing isolation and loneliness in later life through efforts that strengthen meaningful bonds.

Each priority area will afford an opportunity for RRF to fund innovative and effective projects that support the ability of older people to live fully in community settings. Grant eligibility differs by our grantmaking approaches – some projects are limited to Illinois, whereas others require a national reach, if not in Illinois. 

National Scope

• Advocacy to advance systems change, including the development, adoption, and enforcement of polices and practices, coalition building, and grassroots organizing. 
• Actionable research to seek solutions to significant problems that affect older adults. Generally, we support policy research, dissemination and implementation sciences, and intervention studies that are generalizable to large numbers of people.
• Knowledge sharing and awareness raising to convey information, shape narratives, and drive positive change on aging issues through journalism, learning communities, media, and dissemination.

Illinois-based

• Direct Service to significantly expand or enhance the availability and quality of scalable models and approaches to community-based services for older people.
• Organizational capacity building to help eligible nonprofits create the infrastructure and capacity to better serve older people (e.g., resource development, strategic planning, and governance.

As RRF implements its strategic plan, we anticipate learning valuable lessons, sharing our insights, partnering with others, and seeing important gains as we continue improving the quality of life for older people.