Nonprofit Spotlight: Center for Combating Elder Abuse

The Center for Combating Elder Financial Abuse strives to protect the elderly and their families from predators who commit elder financial abuse. They provide in-person or video-based preventive education for the elderly and their families, social service groups, veteran and religious organizations, financial and educational institutions, medical centers, and entities of the criminal justice system. 

President, John Schwartz, describes the Center and its website as, “designed to be a national level resource to serve our nation’s 56 million elders.” The organization uses a two-step approach to educate the public. They use summaries of convicted predators to demonstrate the predators’ tactics and their methods for assessing potential targets. Some predators gain access to victims through face-to-face meetings, while other predators hide behind a keyboard or telephone. The summaries are paired with the Financial Vulnerability Survey (FVS) from the University Institute of Gerontology, to help individuals quickly assess how vulnerable they are to elder financial abuse. This combination provides education about predators and one’s vulnerability to these threats. 

John boasts of a collaboration with both the West Chester University (WCU) Criminal Justice Program (West Chester, PA) and the Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veteran Affairs (PA DMVA) to increase awareness of the campaign against “Pension Poaching” against elderly military veterans in Pennsylvania. John remarked, “My vision is to replicate this success in Virginia and continue protecting elderly military veterans.” In summation, he stated, “We’ve made tremendous progress in these past two years, but still have a large task ahead of us.” 

Visit https://endefa.org/ to learn more.