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  • Week 1: Live Longer, Better
  • Week 2: Create Your Social Circle
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  • Week 5: Find Your Purpose
  • Week 6: Make Your Town Healthier
• All About
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  • The Blue Zones Excerpt
  • Blue Zones Coverage
• For Albert Lea
  Residents

All About the Project

How AARP and Blue Zones created America's healthiest hometown

About 18,000 people live in the southern Minnesota town of Albert Lea. – Photo by Allen Brisson-Smith

The town was named for an Army lieutenant who mapped the area in 1835. – Illustration by Steve Sanford

The AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project, sponsored by United Health Foundation, set out to create America's healthiest hometown by adding 10,000 years of healthy life to its residents. A typical American community, Albert Lea, Minnesota, was chosen from several small cities in the mid-West.

In January 2009, Vitality Project experts began working with Albert Lea's town leaders to transform the way residents eat, work, exercise, and play. Together they started adding community gardens, making over restaurant menus and vending machines, creating "walking school buses," and building new walking trails.

In May, Albert Lea residents began signing the Vitality Project Pledge and taking the Vitality Compass®—an interactive tool that helps measure an individual's projected life expectancy based on current behaviors.

On September 8, the project launches its six-week online experience to teach people to live longer and healthier through daily dispatches, videos, photo galleries, and longevity tools. The Vitality Project team will then calculate how many additional years have been added to participants in Albert Lea—and around the country.

The Key Players

AARP
AARP knows that people of all ages and communities don't want to just live longer; they want to live healthier and more purposeful lives. AARP teaches them how through the Vitality Project.

Blue Zones
For eight years, Dan Buettner has studied the world's longest-lived populations and, through his design and execution of this project, shares the lessons of these "Blue Zones."

United Health Foundation
United Health Foundation is committed to promoting innovation in the health of individuals and communities, and is proud to support the Vitality Project as a model that can be replicated in cities nationwide.