“For small not-for-profits delivering critical services, they don’t have the capacity to pay for legal support for all these things. It’s a very specialised legal field and we are the only organisation in the country that can supply this type of support for free.
“When governments outsource community service to community organisations, they are also outsourcing the compliance and the risk. If you are going to do that, what support are you proving to those community organisations to meet those obligations? We do that. We provide that help, including referrals for pro bono support from leading law firms around the country.”
The demand for the services of Justice Connect exploded during the pandemic. Nearly 420,000 people accessed their Not-for-Profit Law program’s online services. “That’s an astonishing number of people we have helped, as we only have 80 staff,” says Chris.
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Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation CEO Dr Catherine Brown OAM agrees that COVID changed the not-for-profit landscape. “The positive impact that Justice Connect has had during COVID-19 has been amazing,” she says, noting that the Foundation provided funding to help digitise Justice Connect’s services and later boosted its funding again due to the increased demand.
“The Foundation aims to strengthen the charitable sector and during COVID our grants became particularly important to help meet the increased demand for services,” she says.
Another issue exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic was the growing number of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness.
Justice Connect’s Homeless Law program helps to prevent homelessness for many vulnerable groups. One of the projects it runs is the Women’s Homelessness Prevention Project, which over eight years has provided integrated legal and social work support to keep 1,103 women and children safely housed. This represents a community-wide cost savings of approximately $7.4 million.
During the pandemic, Justice Connect’s Dear Landlord self-help tool was a crucial lifeline to support renters in Victoria understand their rights and options to avoid eviction. It provides guidance on how to write a payment plan request to a landlord, ask for a rent reduction, prepare a VCAT review application, or find further help – such as the private rental assistance program.
Since launching Dear Landlord in 2020, almost 84,000 renters in Victoria have used the tool, helping them put in place early intervention strategies to avoid evictions into homelessness.
In addition to helping people avoid losing their home, Justice Connect also assists people already experiencing homelessness. Not just their legal problems, but all their related life problems. “We work at the acute end of people experiencing homelessness,” Chris says.
“We need to understand the whole environment, so we employ social workers who can help navigate all those connection points such as family violence support, financial counselling, or health, employment and housing referrals.
“That coordination role, which can often be invisible, is vital.”
Delivering holistic, client-centric supports is what Justice Connect is all about. “We provide wrap-around support,” Chris says. “We don’t just take a slice – the legal problems – deal with that and then say it’s over to you. When supporting people with multiple complex problems, that’s just not appropriate.”
As a community legal centre, Justice Connect provides legal help and advice not just through their legal staff, but via their network of 10,000 lawyers from over 50 of Australia’s leading law firms who are ready to deliver pro bono legal help.
Homelessness became an even more urgent issue during COVID-19 as people feared losing their homes if they couldn’t pay their rent or mortgage. While there was a temporary moratorium on evictions, some people were not aware of it.
This is where Justice Connect played an important role in providing information about tenant rights. But Chris says that the old way of doing this – putting up fact sheets on a website – is just not enough. Instead, “we flipped the process – we started listening.” That meant actively monitoring what searches people were making online and working backwards from there to answer those questions, and get the right resources to people desperate for help.
The Foundation had worked with Justice Connect before. “There were a lot of people facing uncertainty in those early days of COVID because they had suddenly become unemployed and couldn’t pay their rent.
“Justice Connect explained to us that if they had better digital capability in-house, they could really expand their services. The extra funding provided by the Foundation was exactly the catalyst Justice Connect needed to scale their impact effectively,” says Catherine.
“Working with digital engagement experts and partnering with the Foundation was vital to the success of our upgrade in online services at a very critical time, and I’m really proud of this,” Chris says.