Family Money Matters

Family Money Matters: AMultilingual Film Series

For Seniors it is estimated that financial abuse is the most common form of abuse. Much of this abuse occurs within families and involves someone the older person thought they could trust. For this reason, the older person often experiences shame and finds it difficult to report the abuse or to talk about it. COVID-19 may also have intensified the issues around financial abuse.

With the pandemic, Seniors Rights Service has had to pivot its education services online. Doing so, we became aware of the needs of multicultural groups that we worked with to have resources in their own language in an engaging ’story’ format. To this purpose, we have developed 5 common legal scenarios in culturally appropriate stories in Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic.

On Wednesday September 9, Seniors Rights Service launched the

first two of these in Hindi with English subtitles at our ‘Family Money Matters’ launch event, which was also broadcasted online via our live webinar. During the event, audiences were shown the videos and were also given the chance to question our lawyers on legal issues and talk to our actors on the issues arising in their community and how the collaboration felt for them. Online audiences were also able to send their questions in remotely.

Seniors Rights Service hopes that the new videos will help to protect older Hindi speakers listeners when they enter into various arrangements with family. In producing the videos, our organisation continued our partnership with the AASHA Foundation to work together on appropriate scripts, sourcing community actors and filming.

The event is an awareness raising campaign running concurrently with our ‘Money Matters‘ radio campaign on culturally diverse radio stations. These are important issues to protect older people and keep families communicating by putting arrangements in writing.

The videos developed around these issues are in Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic.

A New Life Downunder

A New Life Downunder is a video about family issues and examines the ways that isolation can lead to elder abuse.

The Granny Flat

The Granny Flat is a video about family issues and uses a ‘granny flat’ scenario to show how family members can be vulnerable to financial abuse.