Minnesota Board on Aging Legal Needs Assessment 

Older adults face systemic barriers to care and services, particularly within LGBTQ+, Black, and Indigenous communities navigating compounded inequities. The Minnesota Board on Aging (MBA) partnered with Research in Action to develop the state’s first comprehensive, community-informed legal needs survey for older Minnesotans. Findings from this survey will support MBA in structuring statewide plans and programming that directly address older adults’ legal needs.

Partners

The Minnesota Board on Aging (MBA) works to ensure that older Minnesotans and their families are effectively served by state and local policies and programs, so they can age well and live well. The MBA does this through its three major roles: administrator, advisor and advocate. Learn more about MBA.

Community Organizations

One of our key goals is to build relationships with trusted community organizations — especially those not already connected to the legal services network — to help share the survey in ways that are culturally relevant and grounded in community trust. We specifically seek to engage community organizations for older adults; churches and faith-based service programs; block nurse programs; local libraries; outreach teams and service organizations for the unhoused; and councils for home care and assisted living.

Problem

As we age, we navigate a variety of unique legal challenges. The Minnesota Board on Aging wants to ensure that outreach efforts, educational programming, and funding priorities are responsive to older adults’ needs, but first require grounded statewide data. Legal needs assessments often do not account for older adults’ unique needs, perspectives, or compounded systemic barriers to services. Older adults are also often dubbed a ‘hard to reach’ population that is often excluded from research processes. However, this is often a reflection of outreach and engagement strategies that are not tailored to this population.

Process

Research in Action created a survey instrument to measure older adults’ prevailing legal needs, particularly those who face systemic barriers due to income, race, language, disability, or rural isolation. Informed by participatory action research and a racial justice framework, this project centers the lived experiences of older adults and aims to strengthen the responsiveness and accessibility of legal services.

We incorporated feedback on the survey draft from those working in legal services, long-term care, and academics specializing in elder law. To validate the current draft, RIA team members facilitated feedback sessions with three older adults to gauge the survey’s clarity, feasibility, and sensitivity to community members' needs. These sessions gave us further insights on common barriers to services such as accessibility and education and outreach strategies that would ensure older adults statewide are able to contribute their voice to the statewide survey.

To support the survey’s statewide implementation, we also developed a two-year research plan outlining activities to further validate the survey and ensure the survey’s distribution efforts are responsive to this community. Highlights from the research plan include: 

  • Recommended strategies for piloting the survey across 3-5 regions prior to statewide distribution

  • Developing an older adult community action council to guide the survey’s piloting