The European project “Homes4Life” (http://www.homes4life.eu) started in December 2018 and will end in November 2020. Its main output will be the development of a new European Certification Scheme for age-friendly housing in Europe. The scheme will be based on a long-term vision of people’s needs and requirements based upon a holistic life-course approach and a new conceptual framework for age-friendly housing. It will help develop improved home environments that foster our independence, supporting us to remain active and healthy, and integrating construction and digital solutions where this is beneficial.

The purpose of this report is to present the Homes4Life Dissemination and Communication plan which identifies, organises and defines the management and promotion of the Homes4Life project objectives and results.

The key underpinning concept of the Homes4Life dissemination & communication (D&C) strategy is to target key external stakeholders based upon a three-stage process going from awareness to understanding and ultimately to a point where stakeholders are applying and exploiting the Homes4Life project key outcomes. In the first 12 months of the project the main focus of the dissemination actions is on stage 1 of the dissemination strategy (i.e. dissemination for awareness). During the next 8 months of the project it is anticipated that project partners continue with stage 1, but as concrete results emerge and milestones achieved, the dissemination strategy moves to stage 2 (i.e. dissemination for understanding). In the final two months of the project the focus will mainly be on those stakeholders who have the ability to implement the Homes4Life vision and certification, and the dissemination strategy moves thus to stage 3 (i.e. dissemination for action) which will make use of the practical material for exploitation/implementation (such as the Certification scheme promotional package)

The report also gives a summary of all D&C activities conducted over the first period of the project, i.e. from M1 to M12. All targets which were set at the beginning of the project when establishing the D&C plan have been met or exceeded, with the exception of the two KPIs related to Social Media (Twitter) and the CoI, which are slightly under at the time of writing this report. Specific efforts will be dedicated to these two criteria over the second period of the project. Project partners participated to 19 events, have been active on social media, and several articles about the project have already been published or are in progress to promote the project, its ambition, and support the exploitation of its upcoming results.

The Homes4Life “Community of Interest” (CoI) is a network of key stakeholders interested in following the developments of the project and as such, supposedly interested in topics at the crossroads of ageing, housing and the age-friendliness of the built environments. The successful delivery and take-up of the project productions will depend on the capacity of project partners to engage with a representative range of stakeholders to be involved for the adoption of an age-friendly approach to housing. This holds particularly true for the design and adoption of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme, main output of the project, that will be the subject of a dedicated exploitation scheme targeting specific categories of stakeholders.

In that context, the Community of Interest will play a crucial role, by allowing for the consortium both to communicate on the project results and to obtain stakeholders’ inputs. These stakeholders range from public authorities to construction and industrial experts, technologists, providers of personal household services and representatives of inhabitants and older adults – be they owners or tenants. After 12 months of project, the Community of Interest count 121 individual members from more than 20 different countries (as of Nov. 26th, 2019) – mainly in Europe. A large majority of those members wishes to be informed about the project progress and achievements. More than half of them is willing to contribute to the development of the Certification Scheme; a same share is interested to test it.

Members of the Community of Interest have the possibility to contribute to the project and bring external expertise. This has been the case for instance during the first stakeholder workshop organised in Brussels on 11 June 20191. The Community of Interest will be maintained after the end of the project for instance by the entity that will exploit the Certification Scheme. Such a Community will be critical after the end of the project to foster the uptake of the Certification Scheme and to be able to identify and contact future demo cases or early buyers.

The Community of Interest has been initiated by communicating about Homes4Life among all the partners networks. It keeps growing thanks to a snowball effect, as more and more stakeholders hear about the project, e.g. during conferences and events attended by the partners. During the remaining 12 months of the project, the consortium will keep exchanging with the Community of Interest about the work carried out, the deliverables published, the events we organise, etc. It is expected to reach 750 members by November 2020.

European countries have witnessed the rising issue of ageing population and thus the level of awareness globally grows. Our living environments have a key role in enabling older citizens to stay active and participate in society and to have a full role in the community.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 20171), housing is one of the three pillars composing age-friendly environments, along with accessible outdoor environments, transport and mobility. The impact that our homes can have on our health and wellbeing is also something well acknowledged.

Considering this context Homes4Life project has the objective to overcome those barriers by the development of a European certification scheme for age-friendly buildings and neighbourhoods ready for wide-spread adoption by a dedicated community of lead users.

This functional brief is the document that formalizes the need of the Homes4Life certification scheme around Age Friendly Housing, and it details the expected functionalities of the certification scheme as well as the constraints (technical, regulatory, …) it will have to face.

It also synthetizes the work done in T2.4(Working Taxonomy) and complements it with the results from the analysis conducted in Task 3.1(Analytical KPI Framework) and Task 3.2 (Analysis certification schemes). This document settles the basis for the development of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme in Work Package 4: Certification Scheme of Homes4Life model.

The functional brief includes the approach to the Certification Scheme, considering the benefits for the end-user, the context where it will be developed, and the limits found in the existing schemes.

It also establishes the scope and the principles of the future H4L certification scheme, detailing its future clients, the kind of building typologies that will be certified, the phases of the building where it will be evaluated, the indicators that will be analysed and finally a first approach to the assessment system and to the scoring method that will be used.

The process to follow to achieve the development of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme and the phasing of the process are sketched giving a first idea of the future definition of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme that will be totally defined, tested and developed during the next twelve months of the project.

This document presents the Technical Reference Framework (TRF version 0) for the Homes4Life certification scheme. It lists all the requirements which will form the scheme in the future digital platform. It constitutes a provisional version of the TRF that will be further developed in v1 in M20 and final version in M22.

The main principles of a certification scheme are defined according to Certivéa’s experience and knowledge about certifications schemes. Specifics for Homes4Life certification scheme are described based on the deliverable D3.4: Homes4Life Functional brief.

The document goes through different aspects that must be considered when developing a Certification scheme. It details the main characteristics of a certification scheme, its principles and structure and general recommendations for its requirements.

Afterwards it focuses in the specific characteristics of the Homes4Life certification scheme, according to the Functional Brief (D3.4). Identification of the clients of the certification scheme, explanation of the scope of the certification scheme and description of the certification process where each requirement will be specified with its description and assessment method.

Finally, it describes the quality and validation process proposed for the Homes4Life certification scheme within the project.

This deliverable will be followed by two other versions of the TRF (v1 in deliverable D4.3 due month 20 and v2 in D4.4 due month 22).

This deliverable is focused on identifying and analysing existing research and innovation (R&I) initiatives and on detecting gaps and shortcomings in overcoming barriers for investments for generating age–friendly building stock (renovation and new buildings, including community integration). The analysis has been made between the partners of the projects for identifying the most significant projects in the European scenario. Furthermore, the analysis has been extended also to National and Regional projects to have a point of view focused on concrete and real scenario and a cross-cultural difference between projects from different countries or areas. The analysed projects came from several research and innovation programmes, e.g. H2020, Active and Assistive Living (AAL), More Years Better Lives Joint programming initiatives, etc. A selection of these projects has been made to provide a list of projects that can identify gaps to be covered from Homes4Life. The project has been divided in 3 major classes:

• Large Scale IoT pilots
• Smart living environments
• Independent Living and Ageing well

For each categorises has been analysed several aspects:

• A general description
• Goals
• Strengths and Opportunities
• Weaknesses and Threats

The analysed projects have been chosen in different areas of research, e.g. psychological, social, architectural, urban, ICT to embrace all the main aspects that the certification scheme for age-friendly environment should cover.

What does already exist around certification of age friendly living environments? To face the development of Homes4Life certification scheme the existing certification, labelling schemes, guidelines and local and regional initiatives and laws must be identified and analysed. This deliverable goes though the existing and emerging certification and labelling schemes as well as guidelines and local experiences and analyses them to identify the gaps and barriers that these existing schemes have found for their implementation.

The purpose of this analysis is to pave the way for the definition of the functional brief in Task 3.4: Summary functional brief and to feed the Task 3.1 Analytical KPI framework.

The gap analysis will also enable partners to identify complementarity and compatibility requirements to be imposed on the new labelling scheme if it is to function in conjunction with and capitalize on the potential of existing national and sub-national schemes.

The main objective of this analysis is to identify not only the existing certification schemes, guidelines and initiatives around all the issues related to age-friendly housing to recognize the common points, but also gaps or uncovered fields that are considered fundamental for the Homes4Life Certification Scheme (CS).

• Physical cluster
• Outdoor accessibility cluster
• Personal cluster
• Social cluster
• Economic cluster 

  After this method 15 certification schemes were selected:

1. The Design for All approach
2. High Health Safety Label (HS2)
3. The Habitat Senior Services label
4. NF Habitat HQE certification
5. R2S-Ready2Services Label
6. VISEHA label
7. HQE Sustainable Building Certification
8. BREEAM Certificate
9. The WELL building standard
10. TQB assessment scheme
11. AARP Livability Index – Great Neighbourhoods for all Ages
12. WoonKeur
13. Code of openness
14. Home Performance Index
15. HQE CS “Services residences”

Throughout Europe a variety of innovative pilot projects – or ‘experiments’ – are being implemented to improve the life-course resilience of existing and newly built home environments. These experiments reflect the distinct socio-economic context of their locations and, more importantly, they provide a glance into potential future directions for the development of age-friendly homes. It is important to take stock of this diversity in order to get ideas about the range of home environments into which the Homes4Life certification scheme might be introduced and therefore about the flexibility required by the certification scheme when it is deployed throughout Europe.

The Homes4Life project has posited for itself an ambitious set of targets. It aims to stimulate investment in age-friendly homes and improve opportunities for ageing well in place for the European population, by both defining and offering a holistic, positively framed long- term vision for inclusive housing in Europe, and offering practical tools in the form of certification. To unite those two workstreams into a coherent whole that will support stakeholders to understand one another, work together and find common ground for action, tools are needed to bridge the gap and facilitate the transition between long-term vision and current practice.

The Homes4Life has accordingly set itself the task to develop two instruments for this purpose: a working taxonomy, and a framework of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The working taxonomy of age-friendly homes (D2.4) presents a structured and detailed breakdown of what it means for a home to be age-friendly? Which functions does the home environment have to fulfil? Which elements in its location, setting, design, construction and components contribute to its fitness for purpose? Which stakeholder groups are in some way involved with the age-friendly home environment and what do they need and want from the home in order for it to be fit for their social, practical or economic purpose? The working taxonomy is a first attempt to answer these questions in a structured way. In doing so, it aims to fill an evident gap in current understanding of and discussions around age-friendly homes: the lack of basic shared descriptive language for academic and practical discourse. This lack of a common reference framework hinders efforts to improve the age-friendliness of the European stock of homes: without a usable framework it is very hard to identify which problems to tackle, which intervention strategies are likely to work, and/or how to incentivize improvements appropriately.

Imagine a society where your house is truly your home. A supportive, enabling environment that helps you realize your full personal and social potential. Imagine a society where such houses are within reach for Europeans of all ages, regardless of income, gender, race or ethnic background, sexual orientation, health status, or disability. This is the vision Homes4Life supports for 2040.

Homes4Life (H4L) project aims at addressing the challenge of ageing in place for older people, in a living environment that corresponds to needs and preferences that evolve over time. It will do so by contributing to the development of a new European certification scheme (CS), based on an inspirational and realistic long-term vision of people’s needs and requirements in a holistic life-course approach. It will also help developing better living environments integrating construction and digital solutions where this is beneficial.

As part of Task 2.2, H4L partners have organised a “Stakeholder workshop” which objective was to expose the first results obtained in Tasks 2.1, 2.3 and 2.41, but also to receive all the opinions, comments and inputs from the audience. H4L partners will use this material to fine-tune their research, to understand each stakeholder’s concerns, etc., in order to draw the most coherent, inclusive and functional CS.

The workshop gathered 58 participants in Brussels, among them expert members of the H4L expert board and stakeholders from a wide array of sectors (older people networks, public authorities, research institutes, consulting firms etc.) all across the EU. It was divided in 3 sessions covering the different parts of the preliminary work:

• Session 1: Age-friendly housing today and tomorrow
• Session 2: Vision 2040 for age-friendly environment in Europe: potential scenarios and the stakeholder roles
• Session 3: From taxonomy to certification – priorities and concerns.

The inputs of the participants have been gathered during roundtable sessions by Homes4Life partners and compiled in this report. Partners especially expected feedbacks on the following aspects:

• Level of awareness of stakeholders
• Propositions of success factors and barriers for the implementation of the CS
• Comments about the Vision 2040 already prepared by the consortium
• Input on what the role of each stakeholder should be in the definition and
• implementation of a CS on age-friendly housing (AFH)
• Priority areas and requirement for the development of a taxonomy and CS
• Implications for the operational characteristics of the CS.