How to Engage and Educate Local Stakeholders for Falls Prevention

Marci Phillips is the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the National Council on Aging.  She is responsible for federal advocacy efforts regarding legislation and appropriations affecting the Older Americans Act, economic security, hunger, older workers, elder justice, and other community services for older Americans.

Before joining NCOA in 2008, Ms. Phillips was the Legislative Policy Analyst at the National Community Action Foundation (NCAF), where she advocated on behalf of the nation’s 1,100Community Action Agencies, and she served on the personal and committee staff of a member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Ellen Schneider, MBA, is Director of Policy and Programming for the Osteoarthritis Action Alliance at the Thurston Arthritis Research Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of focus include evidence-based health promotion and disease prevention programming, osteoarthritis, healthy aging, falls prevention, and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Ms. Schneider manages the national process to review potential new programs for the Administration on Community Living (ACL) approved evidence-based health promotion and disease prevention program list; programs that are approved are then eligible for Title III-D and other ACL discretionary funding. For the past 14 years, Ms. Schneider worked with the National Council on Aging’s Center for Healthy Aging and ACL to disseminate evidence-based health promotion and disease prevention programs. Ellen is co-author of the 2015 National Falls Prevention Action Plan and assisted over 30 states develop statewide falls prevention coalitions. She also is Co-Principal Investigator for a grant from The Duke Endowment to implement dementia-friendly training within five hospitals in North Carolina. Through her work with NCOA and the Carolina Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program, Ellen has worked extensively with State Health Departments and the aging services network to build infrastructure and implement healthy aging policy, guidelines, and programming. On the state level, Ellen is a founder of the NC Falls Prevention Coalition and the Coalition for a Dementia-Capable NC. She has presented at numerous national and statewide conferences across the country and won the “Best Paper of the Year” award from the Health Promotion Practice journal. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Pennsylvania State University and graduate certificate in aging from UNC-Chapel Hill.