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Roughly 21% of older adults in the U.S. experience some form of abuse, according to recent research. Within Virginia, the state’s adult protective services verified nearly 13,000 cases of elder abuse in 2022. Older adults also face threats to housing, access to care and support services; a January 2025 count by homeless services nonprofit Homeward revealed 40% of Richmond’s unhoused population are over 55 years old.
Two organizations within Virginia Commonwealth University, its department of gerontology and the Virginia Center on Aging, aim to improve quality of life for older adults in the region through a collaborative effort called the Greater Richmond Elder Justice Shelter Initiative.
“There are no shelters like it in the area,” says Sarah Marrs, director of research at the Virginia Center on Aging, “and there’s only a handful of [elder justice] shelters in the country.”
The project’s core function is to meet emergency and transitional housing needs and provide support services to older adults experiencing abuse, neglect and exploitation.
Funded by a first-year grant of nearly $600,000, primarily from the federal Administration for Community Living in the Department of Health and Human Services, the initiative won’t have one central location in the region. Instead, older adults will be directed to tailored services from various organizations in Richmond that provide housing, legal assistance, home‑ delivered meals and more. This decentralized model — relying on multiple nonprofits to provide care across the region within one system — assists in reaching elders in the initiative’s coverage area, which includes the counties of Charles City, Chesterfield, Goochland, Hanover, Henrico, New Kent and Powhatan and the city of Richmond.
Once the network is active, Marrs and her partners aim to support each person in need with a personalized and trauma-informed approach. Angie Phelon, chief program officer at The Span Center, formerly Senior Connections, says coming to each client with a fresh perspective will help the center learn an individual’s needs and provide tailored help. Success for the center would be defined on this individual level, Phelon says.
As older adults seek care from the initiative, grant-funded staff and volunteers will determine their needs. Team members will help individuals find permanent housing, assess their eligibility for benefits such as SNAP, navigate programs such as Medicaid, and even provide transportation to and from doctor appointments.
The nation’s elderly population is expected to grow, and adults aged 60 and older are currently nearly 20% of the city’s population; that’s just one reason Marrs stresses the value of the project’s grant funding and continued investment. According to Marrs, the award has already helped form new partnerships that have permanently housed three older adults, with plans to house another in the short term. Because the grant is distributed over two years, the team is only witnessing the beginning of the grant’s benefits.
“You see the need and find the right people, and you jump in and try to do something like that,” Marrs says, “and it’s been incredible that we’ve been able to get this grant and have the sort of success we’re already seeing from it.”
