New ACT service to assist victims of financial abuse

For example this could be somebody who leaves a violent relationship and is forced onto the streets as their former partner controlled all the finances.

It was scenarios such as these that spurred an ACT government agency to seek a service to give better support for front line workers to better recognise and respond to financial abuse.

Design studio Future Friendly devised the new service for the ACT government's Family Safety Hub.

Future Friendly Canberra founder Anthony McGinness said they had initially started work with the Family Safety Hub last year. The work had led to discussions about what the Hub had been doing in relation to people who experienced financial and domestic violence.

Mr McGinness said through working bees with the Family Safety Hub they determined the existing system was not designed to kick in at the appropriate point.

"A pretty common pathway is where someone might be leaving a situation of family and domestic violence and in doing so might be moving a pretty significant chunk of their income," he said.

"They might be wanting to maintain this sense of normality maybe with their children in terms of their home, their school but very quickly their situation around their finances spirals into crisis.

"All of a sudden they find themselves in crisis and that's typically where the system is designed to kick in... and so we wanted to start exploring how we could actually bring that response forward, what support could we provide people earlier so the system doesn't intervene at that point of crisis."

From there, they worked on a system that would help address the issue of financial abuse at this important stage. It is being developed in two phases.

Mr McGinness said the first phase was looking at how to tackle what he described as a "hidden problem" and looked at how to increase awareness and demand with workers and the community.

The second phase will entail setting up the service.

"A really important first step, which is now underway, is actually building capability within the community services sector... around understanding what financial abuse is and being able to identify with their providing service some of the early signs of financial abuse," Mr McGinness said.

"Once we start driving that demand we actually need to set up a specialised service that will specifically deal with issues related to financial abuse."

The service itself would be an embedded and co-located model. Mr McGinness said this would curtail a problem where a person may visit a service but be told it would take two weeks to book an appointment with a financial counsellor.

"The drop-out rate is astronomical, you need to be there ready to provide that support in a co-located way, embedded with existing services," he said.

"The other element is it needs to be holistic, it needs to provide the wrap-around support people need and so it's bringing together a few different practitioners to provide the support and that includes a financial counsellor."

While COVID-19 had delayed the roll out of the service, Mr McGinness said training packages, or the first phase, had been delivered to several community services.

Care Financial has also assisted with the service.