Community legal education

Introduction

Legal Aid NSW provides targeted community legal education (CLE) for priority client groups and community professionals.

CLE events are delivered by staff across Legal Aid NSW. Our Community Legal Education Branch coordinates, manages and delivers CLE and related projects.

In 2023–24, we delivered 1,721 CLE sessions. We delivered 798 CLE events face to face including contributing to 178 stalls at events across NSW. We distributed thousands of educational resources.

We published nine Law for Community Workers podcast episodes in 2023–24, which were downloaded over 7,050 times. The most popular podcast covered ‘Care and protection in NSW – what’s new?’ and had 470 downloads.

We hosted 215 online CLE events in 2023–24, including 22 Law for Community Workers webinars that reached 1,643 attendees. We uploaded 64 CLE videos to the Legal Aid NSW YouTube channel, which have been viewed 78,248 times – a 35 percent increase from the previous year. In 2023–24, the Legal Aid NSW YouTube channel gained 1,129 new subscribers, up 25 percent from the previous year.

One of the main ways community workers find out about our upcoming events and new podcasts is through our Law for Community Workers email alert. This year, we sent out 16 alerts to our 3,400 subscribers. Each alert highlighted special events like National Reconciliation Week, NAIDOC, Law Week, Homelessness Awareness Week, Youth Week and International Day of People with a Disability and contained links to our webinars, podcasts, publications and more. We also promoted webinars and events run by community legal centres and others in the sector.

CLE sessions by area of law

Note: CLE figures for 2021–22 have been revised following the identification of system issues that had previously resulted in undercounting.

Law Week 2024 webinars

NSW Law Week is a program of community events and activities designed to help people understand their rights, the law, the legal system and the legal profession.

This year, we partnered with the State Library of NSW, Marrickville Legal Centre and other services to host a webinar series titled ‘People in the law’. Three webinars showcased people with different roles in the legal profession, including lawyers from Legal Aid NSW and community legal centres, ombudsman staff, a magistrate and a barrister.

Providing insight into the roles of people who work within the law demystifies the legal profession and highlights the support organisations like Legal Aid NSW can provide to the community. We had 344 people register for our Law Week webinars, which were live-streamed on Facebook. Feedback from the community was very positive.

Seniors diary and calendar

Our ‘Legal topics for seniors diary’ is our most popular publication and meets an identified need to provide legal information to older people in an accessible and usable format.

This year, we produced the diary and a calendar with funding support from the Department of Communities and Justice and the Law Society of NSW. We distributed 50,000 diaries and 20,000 calendars. Ten thousand of these diaries were distributed to seniors who attended the Sydney Seniors Festival Expo in March 2024.

Legal words for interpreters

For the past nine years, we have delivered workshops for interpreters and bilingual workers to help them understand the tricky legal terminology they may encounter when assisting Legal Aid NSW clients, particularly at courts or tribunals. This year, we ran four workshops on criminal and family law words, both face-to-face and online, for a total of 153 interpreters.

Youth Week Instagram Reels

We created three Instagram Reels targeting young people for Youth Week 2024, focusing on bills, fines and general legal help and assistance.

The videos were originally created as part of the ‘How can Legal Aid help me?’ animated series, which is hosted on our YouTube page and covers the different services Legal Aid NSW offers. By adapting the videos into the Instagram Reels format for Youth Week, we reached over 169,000 young people.

Workshops for young people

We delivered 93 face-to-face CLE events in schools and youth services across NSW in 2023–24 to a total of 4,746 young people. The sessions helped young people build their legal life skills by enhancing their understanding of police powers, sexting and consent, discrimination and more.

Facilitation masterclass

We partnered with community legal centres to deliver an interactive online facilitation masterclass on 6 May 2024, presented by experienced facilitators Ian Colley and Scott Lappan-Newton. Ian and Scott have both done extensive training work in the sector and spoke about running interactive and engaging community legal education in-person and online.

The session was attended by 58 participants, and we plan to run more sessions in 2024–25.

Custody support person training

We delivered eight custody support person workshops to train community members to be support people for young people in police custody. The training was delivered face to face in Kurri Kurri, Muswellbrook, Maitland, Walgett, Coonamble, Dubbo and Wagga Wagga to 80 participants.

The year ahead

• We will develop podcasts for prisoners on a variety of topics, including powers of attorney, visa cancellation and how Legal Aid NSW can help them.
• We will continue to grow our Law for Community Workers platforms and educate more community and health workers on how to spot legal issues and refer clients for legal help.
• We will launch a do-your-own divorce resource – a how-to guide to assist the public in navigating the divorce process.
• We will continue to deliver community legal education to young people through our legal life skills workshop and other tailored workshops in high schools across the state.

Key challenge

Engaging our staff to assist in the delivery of community legal education, particularly our Law for Community Workers webinar series. We plan to meet regularly with staff from our practice areas so we can identify lawyers to deliver community legal education.