About - Beacon Hill Village

About Beacon Hill Village
We are a community of people in central Boston who prosper from directing our lives and creating our own future. We are trendsetters for a new generation of people over 50 and invite you to join us in this exciting venture.
In 1999, our founders, a group of friends, gathered to talk about the future. We wanted to stay engaged in our own neighborhood in this vibrant city. But we recognized that we might need support in the future. We looked beyond conventional solutions. We wanted more freedom and control than we found in models that focus on single issues, such as housing, medical care, or social activities. We wanted to be active, taking care of ourselves and each other rather than being "taken care of." After much consideration, we developed a grassroots membership organization. We, the members, decide what we need and want. We have an expert staff, a great variety of service providers, enthusiastic volunteers, and strategic partners, but we govern the Village, design its offerings, and make it all happen. We are self-supporting, funded by membership fees and donations; we are self-governing as a secular, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.
The Village cares about the whole person as it responds to individual interests and requests. We offer a great variety of activities and social events. We take pride in offering members a solution or helpful response whenever they call the Village office. We are skilled at locating and evaluating the best local resources and usually negotiate discounts and preferred service. Some services are offered by volunteers, others by professionals. We also have strategic partners, professional organizations that support our goals, including experts in home health care and geriatric medicine. We enrolled our first members in January 2002 and have grown to nearly 400 members. Our operating principles have inspired hundreds of other communities in the United States and beyond: there were are more than 350 open and developing villages at the time Beacon Hill Village celebrated our 15th anniversary. We are connected to many of them through another innovative organization that we helped to create, the Village-to-Village Network.

Beacon Hill Village • 74 Joy Street • Boston, MA 02114 • info@beaconhillvillage.org • 617.723.9713

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