By Jill Vitale-Aussem, President & CEO, Christian Living Communities & Lydia Nguyen, PhD, Principal Researcher, LifeLoop
Most senior living leaders can describe the culture they want their community to have, but far fewer have a practical way to find out whether residents and team members actually experience it that way. Today we are sharing a free tool designed to help close that gap: the Community Citizenship Assessment, developed by Christian Living Communities (CLC) and LifeLoop, and built around CLC's Citizenship Model®.
This blog post explains the purpose behind its creation and how we hope communities will use it. The full packet is available to download at the end of this page.
In a traditional service or hospitality model, residents are treated mainly as customers: the community provides and the resident receives. CLC developed the Citizenship Model® to change that relationship, so that residents are valued for what they contribute as well as for what they receive. In this model, residents help meet their own needs and the community's, share in decision-making, take on real responsibilities, and help shape the norms that guide daily life, with the goal of empowerment and engagement rather than entitlement and helplessness. The model also aims for a culture that truly embraces aging, and the momentum and opportunity that comes with it.
Values like these are easy to endorse, but much harder to verify. Culture shows up in many small, everyday moments, such as who plans the programs, who gets invited to join a table at lunch, how the community responds when someone passes away, and whether a resident feels comfortable using a common room without asking permission, and those moments rarely appear in the metrics communities already track. CLC and LifeLoop partnered to build a way of measuring them, so that communities can see where the model is taking hold, where it is not yet, and where to focus next.
The assessment covers four categories of citizenship, each capturing a different part of how residents experience community life:
Purpose, growth, and contribution: Opportunities to contribute, use one's strengths, and make a difference.
Inclusion, acceptance, and community norms: Feeling welcomed, valued, and part of community life.
Empowerment, ownership, and self-governance: Having voice, choice, influence, and meaningful control.
Interpersonal connection and relationship-centered culture: Developing reciprocal, supportive relationships.
There are two parallel surveys, because citizenship looks different depending on where you stand. The resident survey captures how citizenship is experienced in everyday life, while the team member survey captures how organizational practices and interactions support it. Both use the same four categories and a simple agreement scale, and each includes a space for comments, stories, and examples.
CLC and LifeLoop developed the surveys together in 2025 and piloted them in seven CLC communities. Residents, team members, and executive directors completed the surveys and then shared feedback through facilitated discussions and one-on-one sessions, because we wanted to learn not only what the scores said but also whether the questions made sense to the people answering them and whether anything important was missing.
That feedback shaped the tool you can download today. Residents in the pilot told us they wanted results to be transparent and to lead to real change, which is why the guide encourages communities to share a summary of results with residents and team members and to invite them to help choose next steps. We took that message seriously, and we hope communities that use the assessment will do the same.
It is important to be clear about what this tool is. It is a self-assessment and improvement tool that has not yet been psychometrically validated or normed. The scores reflect the perceptions of the people who respond, so who takes part matters. We encourage communities to use the results to start conversations, identify strengths and growth areas, and track their own progress over time. We do not intend the scores to be used to rank communities.
The complete packet is free to download and use. It includes everything a community needs to get started:
Assessment guide: Background on the Citizenship Model® and how to use the tool.
Scoring guidance: Step-by-step scoring instructions and descriptions of each stage for the overall score and for each category.
Resident survey: The survey to be completed by residents.
Team member survey: The survey to be completed by team members.
We are continuing to refine this tool, and the people who use it are best placed to tell us how it performs in practice. If you use the assessment, we would welcome hearing what you learned, including which questions worked well, where the scoring guidance helped or fell short, and what your community decided to do next, because that feedback will help us improve future versions and understand how the tool works across different kinds of communities.
You can provide feedback to Lydia Nguyen, PhD, Principal Researcher at LifeLoop, at Lydia.nguyen@lifeloop.com.
We are deeply grateful to the residents, team members, and executive directors who piloted the assessment and generously shared their honest perspectives. We hope it helps your community see more clearly what is working, where there is room to grow, and how residents can be recognized for what they contribute as well as for what they receive.