Our vision: A fairer, more just society.  

Our mission: Embed rights in our communities to reduce inequalities, challenge unfair systems and advance social justice through specialist legal advice and education.

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.  

Our Rights in the Community strategy has three strands, which underpin our work and activity:

People

Aim:

More people will know their rights and have access to justice leading to greater prosperity for individuals who are marginalised and disadvantaged.

How we do this:

·       Delivering specialist social welfare legal advice and representation to people who are marginalised, disadvantaged and discriminated against.

·       Providing holistic advice and support and identify interrelated legal issues to prevent them from reaching crisis point.

·       Creating a range of referral pathways so people are able to access legal advice at an earlier stage.

·       Sharing our knowledge internally across teams and externally with our partners and clients by Public Legal Education to support people to understand their rights and how to use the law to enforce them.

·       To be a centre of excellence by being an equal opportunities employer recruiting, building and developing a highly skilled and committed workforce.

·       Offer fully inclusive services, using data/audits to measure and record impact.

Securing diverse funding, including 'core' funding, earned income (legal aid) and working with funders to secure multi-year funding streams.

Partnership

Aim:

The social action and social justice work of organisations, practitioners and activists becomes more effective in enhancing legal capabilities of local communities and delivery of services.

How we do this:

·       Sitting at the heart of our communities and listening to the voices of our clients and partners to design and shape effective service provision with local communities and partner organisations.

·       Building a community of partners with the commitment, skills and confidence to do more to help people uphold their rights by embedding a rights-focus into their work.

·       Services are delivered with and alongside partners to ensure people are reached and provided with holistic advice and support and that interrelated legal issues are identified at the earliest opportunity to prevent crisis with a focus on inequalities, homelessness, domestic violence, migrant rights, poverty and health.

·       Work with our partners and stakeholders so that they understand our services and the value of specialist legal advice.

·       Identifying system failure and how that impact on people’s health and income.

Policy

Aim:

Through better coordinated, more effective action on shared priorities with our communities, we will work with policy makers to improve policy and systems and their application and effect change to the law where needed.

How we do this:

·       Holding and developing key relationships at national and local/regional levels and across all sectors that we work with​.

·       Working with our communities and partners to gather evidence and identify strategic issues and challenges facing those that are disadvantaged and maginalised.

·       Use our position as a community law centre to feed into partners, statutory organisations and networks lobbying and campaigning work to amplify and support as appropriate​.

·       Learning organisation that is open to external scrutiny and strives to be at the edge of innovation, shaped by data, client experience and staff expertise

·       As the largest Law Centre in the country use our influence with funders and policy makers to sustainably invest in specialist legal advice.

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