A debt advisor from Hackney has started a podcast to provide financial advice to minority communities during the cost of living crisis.

Ripon Ray spent more than six years working as a debt advisor before joining Debt Free London, in Whitechapel, as a quality assurance manager.

He explained he has taken his experiences of giving debt advice to residents at Hackney Central Library and has founded a podcast, Debt Talk, to reach a wider audience.

He said: "Although I've been working on it for some time, I thought, what else can I do to reach out? A podcast can be listened to whilst people are walking around and going to work.

"As I understand it, people prefer to listen to things in their own time rather than sitting in front of the telly and watching it. I do podcasts once a month, on subjects that will give community members awareness of some of the issues that they need to confront while we're all dealing with financial problems."

He hopes to mainly target minority ethnic communities: "I'm proud to say I've worked primarily around minority communities. That is my strength partly because of my minority background.

"I have done work in the past around minority communities and managed to bring minorities together with charities, local government representatives, and MPs.

"I thought I should carry on doing what I'm good at by making sure communities that are hard done by are not forgotten and that they themselves can learn to organise campaigns to develop their confidence in challenging authorities, getting advice and getting support."

Ripon said that minority communities in east London are impacted "significantly more" by economic shocks due to issues such as crowding and IT literacy.

He added: "They need a platform, they need a voice, they need to see that they can talk about their issues without feeling as though their voices are put second place."

The second episode of the podcast will be uploaded on September 14 and will cover the theme of "domestic abuse, mental health and money trouble during the cost of living crisis".

Debt Talk can be accessed on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7hoqQcAQxcZjNnifU92eEc.