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- Published: 20 January 2015
Interview with Anh Ngo, Project volunteer, Vietnamese Women’s Association of Toronto Family Services
CNPEA: Tell us about your project.
Anh: Preventing Abuse of Loving Seniors (PALS) was created in partnership with Vietnamese Women’s Association of Toronto Family Services (VWAT), the Korean Canadian Women’s Association (KCWA) Family and Social Services, and the Hong Fook Mental Health Association. It is a three-year project funded by the New Horizons for Seniors Program. PALS uses a peer-leadership model to connect with Vietnamese, Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin ethno-cultural communities to talk about elder abuse. We have used the peer-leadership model successfully in other circumstances, such as domestic violence in the community, and decided to expand to elder abuse.
We began this project by asking long-term volunteers with our agencies to share our interest in elder abuse prevention work. Traditionally, most of our project participants have been with older women. For us a unique part of this project is the number of older men participating. The span of the project over 3 years was helpful because it gave us time to build up volunteers and implement creative formats to talk about elder abuse.
We wanted to do something creative and make the programming more of a social gathering. In the past we have tried straight elder abuse educational workshops and people are less interested in this type of programming, especially with the perception that people can look up information online.
CNPEA: Can you tell us about the engagement strategies you used to engage each community—similarities and differences?
Anh: VWAT is the lead agency in the project, with each of the other project partners personalizing the material for their respective community. For example, a lot of Korean participants in our project come from a religious community and we have adapted the material to be relevant to their religious teachings. With the Hong Fook community group we worked with Mandarin and Cantonese speaking elders. In terms of history between these two linguistically unique communities there are a lot of class differences in terms of cultural history, immigration and other factors. We had to be mindful of these dynamics in terms of staging workshops and hosting events.
CNPEA: It is interesting how your project uses different mediums to engage seniors on elder abuse issues. How did these mediums come together and are there key strategies you can share?
Anh: In this project, we worked with seniors to identify different mediums that would appeal to them, including educational theatre, digital story telling and a photo book. We began this project by thinking about what we want to achieve as an output and in what way it will benefit seniors. Usually with these types of projects the output is a final report that is not that useful for the participants. We involved seniors quite heavily in the project planning process before even submitting a proposal.
Educational theater came up as a medium because a lot of participants at the VWAT group came from St. Christopher House, a theater group. We took the lead from the seniors in the group and worked on an elder abuse educational theater project to present at World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD), June 15. The theater project was presented at WEAAD last June. It really showcased that senior participants had in depth experience and knowledge about elder abuse, and were able to promote positive problem solving for both the audience and themselves. All three agencies in the project participated in the World Elder Abuse Awareness Day event. Utilizing a theatrical performance, we were able to bring seniors possessing different languages and cultural backgrounds together to explore the disturbing issues they face. The seniors provided their skills, talents and willingness to create a safe and healthy environment for themselves and other seniors in the community.
The infrastructure and group dynamics of the KCWA group were great for doing a photo book project. The Hong Fook group is still working on their project and is creating an exciting video in Cantonese and Mandarin titled Living with Dignity of Aging.
CNPEA: What else would you like to share about your project—any other key learning’s?
Anh: Across all the work that we do there is an investment in the actual participants and the key peer leaders. A lot of other projects are asking us how we are engaging ethno-cultural communities, and the answer is that it is a really slow community development process. We have had relationships with our key peer leaders for years. Also, having a conversation with seniors about what type of programming they would like to see and aligning their vision with the funding agreement. It really helps with buy-in and honours community wishes for programming.
Along side community development work, we can’t do half of the work we do without partners. Community organizations are always struggling with smaller and smaller pots of funding and developing relationships is really key. However, it is very challenging for us when we provide training and staff capacity building for project workers in different agencies. As we are pursuing additional funding to move the project forward with our community partners and engaging seniors at a more detailed level to recognize abuse in their own networks, we need more support for the lead agency to monitor how the project is going in different agencies. This is a lot of work and we didn’t get more training or admin dollar for this part.
More information on the project can be found on the KCWA website.
