Wachusett Village Inn & Conference Center
Nov. 17 - 20
Registration Deadline: Oct.16

What do we mean by Community Lawyering?

Community Lawyering means using your legal skills to further community goals as part of a team engaged in a multi-forum, multi-tactic advocacy campaign. You'll learn how to bring your legal analysis and litigation expertise to bear in new ways, working together with community leaders and organizations. As part of such advoacy teams, legal aid attorneys are finding they can often have their most profound effect, producing immediate victories on today's important issues, while also leaving behind a solid infrastructure of community based institutions and community leaders to fight on and demand new changes tomorrow...

In our Community Lawyering course you will learn the steps involved in building a legal aid community lawyering practice, and in designing and carrying out multi-discipline, multi-tactic advocacy campaigns, while learning about the other disciplines you will partner with as you pursue a community based advocacy approach. Among the steps and disciplines:

* Community listening and relationship building - learn techniques to create stong new links with community leaders and intitutions
* Media, communications, and strategic framing - learn how to tell a story in a way designed bring people to your side of the issue - rather than lined up against you
* Building grassroots institutions - learn how to use your legal skills to help organizations develop from a few people with a common purpose to a well organized permanent institution that will serve as a vehicle for community engagement for years to come
* Organizing - learn how organizers find and build leaders to unleash the energy, passion and power of our clients though training and strategic action. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls for lawyers when working with organizers and grassroots movements
* Policy advocacy
* Best practices for community education
* Working with and benefiting from difference
o Between you and your community
o Within the community itself

· Building a multi-forum advocacy campaign from the ground up

o Campaign planning and design

o Feasibility analysis

o Choosing issues and tactics

o Work planning

Please click here to learn more and to register: www.legalaideducation.org/community_lawyering/ne