Research with the Village Movement
Virtual Summits Archive:
Summer 2024
The 2025 National Census of Villages
A Nationwide Effort to Survey All Operational Villages in 2025
The 2025 National Census of Villages aims to expand our understanding of the rapidly evolving Village Movement. Our goal was to survey as many operational Villages as possible to learn about the set-up and operations of Villages in 2025. Findings from this project will provide critical data points to help communicate about and advocate for Villages. The project will also guide future collaborative research on Village development, best practices, outcomes, and impact. Data collection took place from August 2025 to January 2026. Data cleaning and analysis, as well as plans for reporting out findings, are currently underway.
Project By the Numbers
9
Months of Planning & Data Collection
245
Villages Represented
88%
Response Rate
37
States Represented
(including DC)
Reflecting on Our Journey Together:
Where We Have Been & Next Steps
The 2025 National Census of Villages represents a multi-year effort to enhance the data and evaluation capacity of the Village Movement by creating a comprehensive, U.S. representative organizational dataset about Villages.
This project was conducted as a follow-up to the "Engaging Villages as Key Partners for Aging Research" project conducted in 2023-2025. In surveying as many operational Villages as possible, we seek to answer critical questions about the scope, scale, and structure of Villages, as well as their potential benefits for diverse individuals and communities. The project was led by researchers at the Rutgers Hub for Aging Collaboration (School of Social Work) in partnership with Village to Village Network (VtVN) and members of the VtVN Data and Evaluation Committee. We thank every individual, organization, and network that contributed in big and small ways!
The Responses Are In...What's Next?
Next steps are underway. After the Census closed in February 2026, the Rutgers research team started working on cleaning and organizing the data. As of late April 2026, the VtVN and Rutgers team are beginning to start disseminating preliminary "first look" findings in several ways, including a poster presentation at the 2026 American Society on Aging (ASA) Conference and at a virtual event for Village leaders and members on May 13. Learn more about the team's ASA poster and "first look" findings dissemination here. The team will continue developing and disseminating further insights in the coming month. Later in 2026, VtVN will publish a national registry with key data points about all Villages that agreed to be included in the registry. VtVN will also prepare mini-datasets of census responses to share with regional leads of Villages through data use agreements.
Project insights can serve as the foundation for future research and collaborations that explore Village development, implementation, effectiveness, sustainability, and more. We look forward to staying connected as we share emerging insights from the census and implications for future projects together.