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Article by Ida Harris
Photo credit: Jared Soares for AARP
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Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan has been asking the same question for nearly thirty years. The work of answering it has never been more essential. Today, she asks it as CEO of AARP, where she leads roughly 2,300 employees and nearly 60,000 volunteers on behalf of 125 million Americans aged 50-plus. She is the first physician to hold the job, and only the second woman in the organization’s 68-year history. The question she brings to every policy debate, budget line, and partnership is the one she has carried since her earliest days in medicine: what do people need to live well, and who is making sure they have it?
The scale is new. The question is not.
As an attending physician at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, she asked it one patient at a time. She treated people, taught medical residents, and began to see where the systems surrounding her patients could be strengthened in ways no prescription alone could address. So, she got an MBA, not to leave medicine but to reach further into it.
As chief medical officer and then president and CEO of Boston’s Dimock Community Health Center, she asked it for an entire community. Dimock serves some of the city’s most vulnerable populations. Under her leadership, the organization brought in nearly $5 million in federal funding, built academic research partnerships, launched an Institutional Review Board, and moved the health system onto digital records.
As president and CEO of CareQuest Institute for Oral Health during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she asked it on a national scale, spending four years focused on closing gaps in access through philanthropy and innovation.
“Every step I’ve taken in my career has been about how I ensure that I’m bringing my talents, my skills, my expertise, and my passion for people to the work,” Minter-Jordan says.
She took the role of CEO at AARP in November 2024, inspired and energized by the opportunity to advance the mission.
“It was really the mission of AARP, to help empower people to choose how they live as they age, that drew me in,” she says. “And then it’s the people who are doing the work: our employees and colleagues across the enterprise and across the country, and also our volunteers. That’s what solidified my decision.”
A New York native, Minter-Jordan traces her career back to a single instinct her parents gave her. “For as long as I can remember,” she has written, “my parents have instilled in me the importance of giving back through service to others, especially those less fortunate.” With that as a guiding principle, she pursued her education at Brown University, earning both her undergraduate degree and her M.D., before heading to Baltimore to begin her clinical career.
The move from Hopkins to Dimock in 2007 was deliberate. She loved her patients, but she had begun to see that the impact she wanted required more than what one physician could do in one exam room. The MBA she earned at Johns Hopkins was the bridge. Dimock was the destination: a community health center where the work was systemic, not just clinical.
That shift, from treating individuals to strengthening systems, defines how she approaches her work at AARP. Healthcare, Medicare, Social Security, caregiving, livable communities, financial security: she sees them as interconnected parts of the same equation. As a physician, she treated the whole patient. As CEO of AARP, she is applying that same holistic lens to the experience of aging.
More than membership perks
Most people know AARP for travel discounts and insurance deals. But beyond those tangible benefits lies a deeper power: strengthening the systems that support health, financial security, and connection over a lifetime.
AARP works alongside congressional leaders, activists, and volunteers to protect Social Security and Medicare, the earned benefits that millions of Americans have spent a lifetime paying into.
“We activate folks. We advocate on The Hill. We advocate locally. We elevate the stories of real people who are experiencing issues with their access to those earned benefits,” Minter-Jordan says. “We lift up the impact that Social Security has on the many people who depend on it.”
AARP has fought to keep Social Security solvent and accessible, to protect recipients’ full benefits, and to block efforts to privatize the program. The organization’s advocacy operates at both the state and federal level. Its state offices work directly with governors, legislatures, and local leaders; its national team engages members of Congress and federal agencies. The focus is on the real-life impact of policy on all Americans age 50-plus.
“We know that for many Americans, Social Security is the foundation for their retirement. This is an earned benefit, essential to health and financial well-being. And we know that for Black Americans, it’s particularly critical,” Minter-Jordan says.
The statistics reflect this reality. Longstanding wage and employment inequities translate directly into lower lifetime Social Security benefits for Black Americans. Without it, poverty among Black adults would double. Minter-Jordan views the protection of Social Security as both an economic issue and a health issue, two things she has never been willing to separate.
“The work that we’re doing in advocacy, fighting for Social Security and Medicare, supporting family caregivers, combating fraud, all of those things are central to the lives of the 125 million 50-plus that we represent, including Black Americans,” Minter-Jordan says. I am committed to ensuring this work strengthens and uplifts every single community we represent.”
Transforming the experience of aging
Minter-Jordan’s leadership arrives at a turning point. By 2030, for the first time in U.S. history, Americans 65 and older will outnumber those under 18. The country is getting older, fast, and the institutions built to serve that population need to keep up.
At the center of Minter-Jordan’s leadership is what AARP calls the Longevity Economy: the total economic and social contribution of adults 50-plus. This demographic generates an outsized share of the national economic activity. Its influence extends well beyond spending into workforce participation, entrepreneurship, caregiving, and community leadership. Businesses that ignore it, Minter-Jordan argues, do so at their own cost.
“The spending power of the 50-plus is $8.3 trillion and growing. But they are not only consumers. They are driving job growth and launching businesses at remarkable rates, and this includes millions of Black entrepreneurs over the age of 50,” she says. “Where businesses invest their time and resources must reflect this reality.”
The Longevity Economy represents a powerful economic and social force, but for Minter-Jordan, it is also about quality of life. She is focused on closing the gap between how long people live and how well they live. The average American spends thirteen of their final years in poor health, financial insecurity, or isolation. Her goal is to close that gap by treating health, financial security, purpose, and social connection as essential pillars of living well longer. She came to that view as a physician. At AARP, she has the platform to act on it.
This strategy comes to life in AARP’s engagement with employers to build multigenerational workplaces, expanding meaningful opportunities for people 50-plus who want to keep working, while strengthening the financial security that allows others to retire on their own terms. It is reflected in AARP’s work alongside entrepreneurs and innovators to co-design technology with older adults, not just for them. And it drives the organization’s philanthropy, which provides direct services to older adults facing hunger, housing insecurity, and isolation.
“As our demographics continue to shift, businesses will be left behind if they’re not thinking about and investing in the Longevity Economy and recognizing the full power of the 50-plus,” Minter-Jordan says. “We create the platform for those conversations. We influence the business sector to think differently. That’s our role, and we take it seriously.”
A stronger focus on caregiving
Family caregiving is one of the most significant and least visible forms of labor in American life. For Minter-Jordan, it is also one of the most urgent priorities AARP is addressing.
The pressures facing Black family caregivers are considerable. Black Americans make up 14% of the nation’s caregiving population, spending roughly 34% of their income on care-related expenses. One in five Black adults is caring for both aging parents and younger family members at the same time. There is deep strength and tradition in Black families caring for one another, but too often that commitment comes at a steep financial cost, compounding the economic realities many were navigating long before taking on this dual responsibility.
“Family caregivers need financial relief,” Minter-Jordan says. “We listen closely to our members, many of whom are supporting both children and aging parents, to understand what they are carrying and how we can provide meaningful resources and support.”
AARP advocates for tax credits, workplace flexibility, and other policies that ease the financial burden on family caregivers. They connect family caregivers to local services through a partnership with United Way, offering legal and financial guides, and maintaining peer support networks where family caregivers can reach one another. At the federal level, the organization pushes for systemic relief, not just sympathy.
Minter-Jordan sees this work as a way to reach people who might not think of themselves as part of AARP’s constituency yet. Many of the country’s family caregivers are in their late 40s and early 50s, younger than the traditional image of retirement-age members. They are already doing the work. AARP’s case is that they should not have to do it alone.
“That opens up an opportunity for us to engage a broader demographic and ask: what do you need? How can we help you get through this with more support, better resources, and a larger community to lean on?”
Community cultivation
Identifying the needs of the 50-plus is one step. Building the support around them is another. AARP also creates spaces where people feel seen, supported, and connected.
According to AARP’s own research, the share of Americans 45 and older who report feeling lonely has risen 35% over the past decade. For a CEO who built her career on the idea that health cannot be separated from the conditions of daily life, the data reinforces the urgency of work that has long been underway. Minter-Jordan is a champion of AARP’s commitment to age-friendly communities and their engagement with local leaders to ensure that urban planning, public spaces, and neighborhood resources reflect the needs of aging residents across race, income, and geography.
This commitment is tangible and local. In Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood, a historically Black community, AARP partnered with residents to transform vacant lots into community gardens. The project reclaimed neglected space and gave people a reason to show up for one another. It is a small example of a large conviction Minter-Jordan carries from her years running a community health center in Boston: that well-being is not something you deliver to people. It is something you build with them.
Defining a legacy
For Minter-Jordan, this work is personal and rooted in a responsibility that extends far beyond herself. She often reflects on the leaders who came before her at AARP and the foundation they built. Their example shapes how she measures her own impact and how she thinks about what comes next.
“I believe in leaving a legacy,” she says. “I think about my predecessors and what they built at AARP. I feel a responsibility to that lineage, and to what comes after.”
The legacy she envisions is about people.
“I want this chapter to mark a transformed experience of aging,” she says. “What does it mean to age well? How do we recognize and value the contributions people make after 50?”
For her, the answer must include everyone. Every community. Every lived experience.
Aging does not look the same for all Americans, and that diversity is a strength.
Each experience carries value. And with more than 125 million Americans over 50, AARP has both the platform and the voice to ensure those experiences are reflected in the policies, workplaces, and communities shaping the future.
That is the legacy she hopes to build: a future where aging is defined by possibility. Where every stage of life is elevated, with health, purpose, security, and connection at the center.