Whittlesea Community Legal Service
Law- Reform- Whittlesea CALD Communities Family
Violence Project
We followed-on from the extensive work we carried-out
last financial year on documenting the need for integrated
responses to family violence. WCC, through its legal
service, has continued to play a leadership role in the
implementation of new prevention and early intervention
family violence model aimed at supporting Whittlesea’s
multicultural communities tackle the prevalent issue of
family violence.
Along with our partners from the Whittlesea Community
Futures Partnership a steering group has been formed
consisting of:?
Whittlesea Community Connections
?
City of Whittlesea
?
Whittlesea Community Futures Partnership
?
The Salvation Army Crossroads Youth and
Family Services
?
?
?
Plenty Valley Community Health
Kildonan UnitingCare
Northern Family and Domestic Violence Service,
Berry Street, Victoria
Victoria Police
?
The project has achieved important success in gaining 3
year funding from the Scanlon Foundation as well as oneoff funding from the Victorian Women’s Trust and Victoria
Legal Aid. These funds will enable us to begin to roll-out 2
of the 6 elements of the model – supporting the social
connection of women from CALD backgrounds and
engaging with community and religious leaders.
VLA funding, in particular, will allow us to recruit a project
worker for a year and will have significant impact in
accelerating the roll-out of the integrated model as well as
increase our capacity to attract more resources for the
project.
Family violence is both prevalent and preventable and WCC
is committed to ensuring that we play our part in
eliminating it from our community.
Funding and capacity-building
Sustained advocacy to increase funding for our legal
service has eventually paid-off with a significant investment
in our team announced in the last days of the Labor
Government. An injection of $480,000 of new money over
the next 4 years is significant for such a vital and underfunded legal service.
This funding success will at last enable us to employ a
family law specific lawyer. Family law accounts for
approximately 60% of all our activities and to have a
specialist lawyer role focusing on building our family law
work is long overdue.
Our representations to Victoria Legal Aid on the legal needs
of our growing community have also paid off with an
announcement that our State funding will also increase on
a recurrent basis by $50,000 per annum from next financial
year.
With the injection of these new state and commonwealth
funds we will be increasing our staffing from next financial
year by at least 2 new lawyers.
Community Legal Education
The provision of community legal education is a key service
for WCLS. Community legal education works by providing
information to people about the way the legal and justice
system operates and by providing important information
about legal rights and responsibilities.
During the year we provided 59 community legal education
sessions (almost 5 per month) covering a range of legal
matters including family law, family violence and wills.
The Attorney General Mark Dreyfus (centre) with WCC staff, volunteers and Committee members on his visit to announce the increase in commonwealth funds to WCLS
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