A fairer, more just society in which an understanding of rights and their power is embedded within communities.  

As a community law centre, we’re using our legal knowledge and expertise to help build a more equal society. We believe that legal rights play a key role in this, and our mission is to activate rights in the communities where we work.

Our Rights in the Community Strategy

We believe that activating and embedding rights in communities is critical to changing the cultures, systems and behaviours that reinforce unfairness, disadvantage and inequality; and ensuring early and preventative action is taken to protect the rights of socially and economically-disadvantaged individuals and communities.

People

The key driver for our approach and the biggest volume of our activity is our work with individuals to ensure more people are protected by their rights and to build their understanding of where they can use legal rights to protect themselves in the future:

• We defend and enforce the rights of clients, advocating for people living in some of the most marginalised communities, challenging unfair decisions and taking cases to the highest courts.
• We support people’s legal capabilities, working with our clients to help them navigate problems better in the future and keep their lives on track.

Partnership

We believe that working within communities to activate and uphold rights is the most effective way to tackle both the drivers of issues and the issues themselves, thereby preventing intractable and often cyclical challenges. We form close partnerships with other community-focused services to help to place legal rights at the heart of their work and to activate a rights-based approach in their interactions with service users, blending our work with theirs so that together we can offer more holistic support to people:

• We support front line organisations by embedding an early-action, rights-based approach into their day-to-day transactions with individuals and communities;
• We develop relationships and collaborative action that creates a community of partners united in ensuring people’s rights are upheld and challenging when they’re not; highlighting injustice, inequality and poverty and seeking change in legislation, local and national policy and practice.

This approach is based on some of the key principles that define our work as a community law centre: we are not gatekeepers of knowledge but seek to make it available to all; we seek to empower the communities we work in by sharing our legal expertise; we work alongside partners so that we can better understand the challenges and issues local communities face.

Policy

We build alliances with organisations committed to identifying and tackling systemic injustice using legal processes to create fairer legislation and policies that reduce poverty, inequality and discrimination:

• We identify and share evidence of strategic issues, service gaps and patterns in clients’ needs and use it as the basis for our strategic action and influencing activity and, internally, to ensure that our strategic focus is aligned with current issues and needs.
• We take strategic action at a local, regional and national level to influence change in policy and legislation, ranging from strategic litigation, membership of local statutory steering groups, boards and advisory bodies through to the work of the Strategic Public Law Clinic, work on national campaigns and responding to calls for evidence.

Our overall approach is to provide early intervention and solutions that prevent people reaching a point of crisis and to tackle both the drivers of issues and the issues themselves to prevent intractable and often cyclical challenges.

Our Theory of Change

This combined set of interlinked activities forms our theory of change which describes how the work we undertake as an organisation supports our visions of a fairer, more just society in which an understanding of rights and their power is embedded within community; and allows us to develop practical plans and pathways to achieve and sustain long-term change.

Our guiding values

These are the values and principles that guide us and ensure we never lose sight of what we are trying to achieve:

• We provide specialist, high-quality legal advice that is free
• Clients are treated with honesty and respect
• We are independent and politically neutral
• We build confidence and legal capability that helps people act early to tackle their problems
• We are not gatekeepers of knowledge but seek to make it available to all
• We seek to empower the communities we work in by sharing our legal expertise
• We work alongside partners so that we can better understand the challenges and issues local communities face
• We are evidence driven and impact focused
• We innovate to meet changing needs and emerging problems
• We are a team - we use all of our expertise and skills together to get the best outcome for our clients