Community Legal Centres working together…
How it helps clients, CLCs and the CLC sector
“The community legal sector has a long and proud history of strong collaboration with each other and across sectors. However our inter-CLC collaboration and partnership work has not had the opportunity to be documented, rigorously evaluated and analysed until now. This project demonstrates the unique skills of the sector to develop more opportunities for client engagement and advocacy when given the opportunities and resources to do so.”
Belinda Lo, former Management Committee Chair and former acting-CEO, Federation of Community Legal Centres
Download the full report "Collaboration Works"
WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT?
This report is the tangible culmination of 20 months of widespread consultation, reflection, service model design, in situ testing and evaluation of the synergies to be gained when Generalist and Specialist CLCs work together. Within the following pages you will find:
- Recommendations about how to continue to develop this important work;
- Summaries of the Project and evaluation methodologies;
- Our findings about the Project’s impact;
- The conclusions we’ve drawn (in the form of blueprints for further inter-CLC collaboration); and
- An evaluation of the four pilot models we tested with 11 CLCs.
WHO SHOULD READ IT?
If you work or volunteer at a CLC, if you are on a Board or Management Committee of a CLC, if you fund CLCs, or if you work in a legal aid commission; this report is relevant to you. Although it reflects on the Victorian context, where there are currently twenty-five Specialist CLCs and twenty-one Generalists, it should have resonance across all Australian states and territories, and anywhere else in the world where the number of vulnerable and disadvantaged people in need of legal assistance outweighs the number of legal services available to respond.
