Kraków is one of Poland’s largest and oldest cities, with over 200,000 older people calling the city home. Anna Okońska-Walkowicz, the city’s Plenipotentiary on Senior Policy, has been instrumental in transforming Kraków to be an age-friendly city, where physical, social, and policy environments have been designed as much as possible to amplify older people’s voices and enable them to continue being and doing what they value for as long as possible.
Core to her work has been the establishment and utilisation of a formal Senior’s Council for the city of Kraków, where older citizens’ needs and perspectives can be heard and amplified to the highest levels of local government. Open to all older residents over the age of 60 living in the city, the Kraków Senior’s Council enabled the development of essential services such as the city’s first Senior Centre run entirely by older volunteers.
Anna Okońska-Walkowicz has also been instrumental for the coordination and implementation of the PASIOS Programme (a programme for promoting the integration and active engagement of older persons), which first ran from 2015 to 2020 and has since been renewed for 2020 to 2025. The programme represents the Kraków government’s commitment to finance activities aimed at supporting the city’s older residents, implemented through the establishment of formal centres. Through these centres, older people can participate in various education, integration, social, cultural, and health-promoting activities for free.
While Kraków had been active in supporting its older citizens in the past, this was limited to much-needed yet narrowly scoped social assistance programmes. Anna Okońska-Walkowicz has changed the way Kraków enables its older residents to thrive by first changing the way older age is thought of – away from stereotypes, and towards a view of later life as an active stage full of potential and opportunities to contribute.