Building Community Legal Service

We began our journey on this front by assisting parents to challenge decisions to exclude their children from schools. After two years, we designed and implemented our "Unfettered Access to Justice." This project extended our work from challenging school exclusions to supporting families with housing issues including overcrowding, unsanitary housing conditions, disrepair issues, and homelessness.

We then discovered that most of the time, housing issues, especially homelessness is closely tied with the immigration status of the individual and found resolving the housing problem without the immigration issue impossible. It was at this point that we considered to also recruit immigration advisers as consultants to assist with the immigration aspect of our services. Further, we discovered that immigration status is also closely tied up with employment and most of the time service users are unfairly dismissed by their employers.

As we progress in our legal service provision, we felt the need to graduate our unfettered access to justice project into Community Law. We recruit and train Community Lawyers from their communities and support them with continuous training and supervision to provide free and culturally appropriate legal services to fellow community members.

As a result of the profound positive impact that this model is making in the lives of migrant and marginalised communities, we've recently launched the South London Community Law Network as a way of scaling the initiative. This Network consist of Community Law Hubs, Community Lawyers, and Young Community Lawyers working together to address the legal needs of their communities. 

We are partnering with colleges, universities, established legal service providers, and legal training providers to ensure its sustainability and scalability.