Coordinated Community Response to Elder Abuse

The Office for Victims of Crime is committed to enhancing the nation’s capacity to assist crime victims and provide leadership in changing attitudes, policies, and practices to promote justice and healing for all victims of crime. Through the FY 2018 Field-Generated Innovations in Addressing Elder Financial Exploitation solicitation, OVC seeks to support projects which focus on elder financial exploitation through innovative collaborations between the financial industry and others to better detect and respond to victims. These efforts should build the capacity of victim service providers and financial industry representatives to enhance fraud detection and provide trauma-informed, age-appropriate services and resources for victims.

With this award, the Elder Law of Michigan will assist a rural, three-county region in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to establish a coordinated community response and a community infrastructure to help address elder financial exploitation, increase the capacity of the service providers through training and information-sharing tools, and provide a way to more completely address the needs of victims of elder financial exploitation. The systems established in this project will be evaluated to determine their efficiencies and their impact on the capacity of the community to address the needs of older adults who are victims of financial exploitation and other forms of elder abuse. The goal of this project is to enhance the capacity of these rural communities to address elder financial exploitation through innovative collaboration with the local financial institutions, law enforcement, aging services, and other community service providers.

CA/NCF