Comings, Goings, and Congratulations

Congratulations and heartfelt best wishes to Mary Twomey, who will be leaving her job as Director of the San Francisco Consortium for Elder Abuse Prevention at the Institute on Aging to become co-director, along with Laura Mosqueda, and northern California liaison of U.C. Irvine's Center of Excellence in Elder Abuse and Neglect.

Obviously I've had a strong interest in Mary's work since she took over as the Consortium's director when I left in 2000. I think it's only natural, when someone takes over a job you've had for 16 years, to have a certain amount of ambivalence. Of course you want them to do well and carry on your work. But there's also a nagging fear that they'll discover your skeletons or shortcomings; or worse, outshine you.

But watching Mary take the Consortium in new and exciting directions has been wonderful to watch. She's led the program with grace, skill, and panache. Under her guidance and with the help of IOA staffers Dana Smith, Melissa Anderson, and Tessa ten Tusscher, the Consortium has made remarkable strides. What was a fledgling support group and counseling program when I left is now an integral component of the IOA's geriatric psychology training program, which means that every participant in the program receives training in working with elder abuse victims. They currently have 20 marriage and family therapist interns, practicum students, and a post-doc. Plans are underway to secure funding for an elder abuse forensic center, which will be modeled on UC Irvine's. The Irvine Center is staffed by legal, medical, social services, and law enforcement professionals who review abuse cases, develop care plans, conduct in-home medical and mental status evaluations and evidentiary investigations, and provide training and consultation.

Mary's new job will involve working with other projects funded by the Archstone Foundation around the state, overseeing technical assistance to grantees, and helping the center provide leadership in statewide advocacy.

Of course I'm looking forward to seeing who fills "our" job next and will keep you posted.

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Congratulations too to Lori Jervis, Assistant professor of American Indian and Alaska Native Programs at the University of Colorado, Denver, for being awarded a grant from the National Institute on Aging for a pilot study on the mistreatment of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) elders. The goal is to lay the groundwork for studying the prevalence/incidence of mistreatment among rural and urban Native elders by exploring alternative methods and proposing recommendations for future research that are both scientific and "grounded in local realities."

They'll be assembling two groups to guide the project: 1) an interdisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in AI/AN communities and a track record in conducting epidemiological studies with the population, and 2) a culturally and geographically diverse panel of Community Experts with backgrounds in Native elder advocacy and abuse prevention. I'm pleased to have been asked to serve on the latter.

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Earlier this week, the Administration on Aging announced grants to operate the National Center for Elder Abuse. The National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse will oversee NCEA's multidisciplinary efforts, the National Adult Protective Services Association will oversee training, and the University of Delaware will serve as co-manager.

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As many of you know, I've had a strong interest in restorative justice approaches to preventing elder abuse. So, I was intrigued and pleased to learn that Arlene Groh, Elder Abuse Restorative Justice Resource Consultant for the Elder Abuse Response Team in Waterloo, Ontario, spent the Second World Elder Abuse Awareness Day in Busan, Korea, giving a workshop on her work. Participants came from all over the country and included elders, academics, experts in family violence, and representative from Elder Abuse counseling centers across the country. The event was hosted by the Korean Information Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (KINPEA) in collaboration with the administration of Busan and the Metropolitan City National Health Insurance Corporation, which is playing a leading role in creating a long-term care insurance service in Korea.

Arlene's visit was at the invitation of Dr. Dong Hee Han, who has a doctorate in elder abuse and is attempting to make changes in how elder abuse is addressed in Korea by looking at a new definition of filial piety, connecting isolated seniors with "cyberspace families," and working with elderly prostitutes.

Posters a Hit!

Word got around about the World Elder Abuse Awareness Day posters designed by a class at City College of San Francisco. I've had 1,000 guests visit my blog this month to check them out, and the City College folks had requests for the artwork from all over the world. The posters have been shown by agencies in the US, Australia, and Canada, and they even made an appearance at the World Health Organization's event in Geneva, Switzerland. Georgia's Department of Human Services had them emailed to all the supervisors across the state, and they will be displayed at a conference for California Long Term Care Ombudsmen in the spring.

"It was rewarding to work on such a meaningful project. The students and I learned much about a topic that we were hardly aware of. We are very happy that our work was met with such enthusiasm."

Regina Rowland, Professor of Graphic Communications, City College of San Francisco

"It's great to see that our hard work has had such a good reception and taken on a life of it's own after we finished working on it."

Clinton Froehlich, Student Project Director

For more on how World Elder Abuse Awareness Day was observed around world, see the website of the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse.

Art for Elder Abuse Awareness

In my March 26 post, I mentioned that an advanced graphics design class at City College of San Francisco that I’ve been working with got interested in World Elder Abuse Awareness Day and decided to design posters for a class assignment. Here are the wonderful results.








Several of the posters have been translated into multiple languages. The class designed collateral materials too.

For those of you who don't know about World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, the event was launched last year on June 15, 2006 and is sponsored by the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA). Communities around the world developed educational programs, press conferences, and awareness events, which ranged from balloon races in the UK, to quilt-making in Canada, to wearing white socks in South Africa. INPEA encourages any group that would like to participate to host marches, vigils, conferences, symposia, press briefings, media events. For more information and other resources, including Community Guide to Raise World Awareness on Adult Abuse Tool Kit, visit NPEA’s website at: www.inpea.net

By the way, the CCSF class has agreed to make the materials available to anyone who’d like to use them to promote events. To find out more, contact Clinton Froehlich, the director of the project, at: clintonf@mac.com

Way to go, CCSF! Thank you.

Please feel free to pass this message along to anyone you think might be interested in using the materials.

Emerging Artists Against Elder Abuse

One of the most enjoyable projects I've worked on lately is consulting with the Health Sciences Department of City College of San Francisco to develop a training for emergency medical personnel– fire fighters, EMTs, and paramedics. As part of the project, which is funded by the Archstone Foundation, we're developing an on-line, interactive class with the help of City College design instructor Regina Rowland.

As an added perk, Regina's enlisted the talents of her advanced design class to help us develop a logo, media kit, ads, and other materials to promote the project. Fellow consultants Eileen Goldman and Sharon Turner, and I have brought the class up to speed on elder abuse as they teach us about branding, positioning statements, and typographics. The result is a very impressive packet of materials that we'll be releasing in the next few weeks.

Now the class is interested in doing a poster for World Elder Abuse Awareness week on June 15. If anyone has an event or project they'd like to promote, I'd be happy to let them know.

NIJ Funds Study on Financial Abuse

The National Institute of Justice recently awarded a 2-year, $300,000 grant to University of Virginia law professor Thomas Hafemeister and psychiatry professor Shelly Jackson to study financial elder abuse in Virginia. Hafemeister, whose “Financial Abuse of the Elderly in Domestic Settings” appeared as an appendix in the National Research Council’s Elder Mistreatment: Abuse Neglect, and Exploitation in an Aging America, is also the director of legal studies at UV’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy.

Working with the state’s APS program, investigators will interview elders who have recently been victimized, their caseworkers, and their caregivers about what happened and why, the state’s response, and how effective those interviewed thought the response was. The study aims to shed light on how financial exploitation compares to other forms of abuse and to get different parties’ perspectives on cases. Interviewers will include students from the law school and grad students in psychology and counseling.

Thanks to Readers for the Following:

Special thanks to researcher Ola Barnett for her detailed and thoughtful response to my January 7, 07 post, The "De-feminization" of domestic violence and what it means for elder abuse. Ola is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology at Pepperdine University and the co-author of Sage Publication’s Family Violence Across the Lifespan: An Introduction. To read it, use the “blog archive” on the right to retrieve the original post and scroll down to comments.

Thanks too to Elizabeth Podnieks, Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University, for alerting me to the July-August bulletin of the International Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA), which describes the first World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. Events ranged from balloon races in the UK, to quilt-making in Canada, to wearing white socks in South Africa. The bulletin describes other events in Uganda, Sweden, Gambia, Nigeria, Israel, Albania, Korea, Ireland, India, and Cameroon, which included theatrical performances, proclamations, and educational events. The bulletin is on INPEA’s website at http://www.inpea.net/index.html

And to Laura Ivkovich, Program Specialist for the Office for Victims of Crime who alerted me to the “Enhanced Training and Services to End Violence and Abuse of Women Later in Life Program. The application deadline is February 7, 2007. For more information, see http://www.usdoj.gov/ovw/docs/enhanced121806.pdf

And to Joan Allen, coordinator of the Ventura County Financial Abuse Specialist Team, for sending "Fighting Financial Fraud," a new video the team produced with funding from the Archstone Foundation. Four scenarios are presented in which elders fall prey to identity theft, an investment scam, a door-to-door sales scam, and telemarketing fraud. In each case, victims are given a “second chance”; the scenes are replayed and the victims avoid abuse by taking simple precautions. The CD is available for viewing at www.seniorconcerns.org