MRU 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 a Law Centre equipped with all the resources we need to operate a fully functional Law Centre. However, while designing our MRU Community Health and Wellbeing Hub project, we discovered that the physical and mental health support, economic wellbeing, and social wellbeing departments will not be fully functional and effective without access to legal advisers. As a result, we made the MRU Community Legal Service Centre as part of our MRU Community Health and Wellbeing Hub so that the Hub can provide a fully rounded and seamless support services to its beneficiaries. 

Therefore, our MRU Community Legal Service Centre is not standing alone. It is now part of a wider support service network. We are currently on a mass legal training drive recruiting and training Immigration Advisers and Chartered Legal Executives or CILEX Lawyers to cover the growing demand of our services.