Published on Thursday 12, November 2020

Youth Outreach Lawyer (YOL) Service

Inner Melbourne Community Legal has received a grant to employ a Youth Outreach Lawyer (YOL) to work with the student cohort and broader communities of St Joseph's Flexible Learning Centre, the River Nile School and the Learning Centre and other youth focused organisations in the area including the Huddle and The Drum Youth Services. IMCL will work with each of these schools and organisations to employ a human centred co-design methodology to determine the optimial form and function of the service to best meet the legal needs of young people at their school or organisation. Through this project, we hope to support young people to remain engaged in education, allow them to grow up healthy, safe and to their full potential, discover new and creative ways of addressing social challenges and test new approaches that have the potential to provide long term solutions.

Initial Project Outcomes 

IMCL's YOL project, funded by the City of Melbourne, works with the student cohort and broader communities of St Joseph's Flexible Learning Centre and the River Nile School to meet the legal needs of young people at their schools. Led by our Youth Outreach Lawyer, Elisabeth (Libby) O'Dea, the project has carried out a number of key activities during 2020.

To inform project design and establish legal needs among students at St Joseph's and the River Nile, a human centred design process was implemented. Key areas of legal assistance and legal education need were identified among students.

To facilitate legal assistance, we distributed information brochures about IMCL and our referral pathways to staff at St Joseph's and set-up an on-site outreach clinic at River Nile. We also developed resources for and carried out secondary consultations to staff to build their capacity to identify legal issues and provide support to students. Delivering legal education to both students and staff is an important part of the project to ensure that legal issues can be identified as they arise and staff and students know where to seek legal help when it is needed.

These crucial steps mean that students are more likely to recognise their problems as legal in nature, and are more likely to seek help. Having our Youth Outreach Lawyer attend on site at the schools helps to break down the barriers to seeking legal help.

The onset of COVID-19 also meant that we had to adapt the execution and progression of the YOL project. immediately, IMCL distributed information about COVID-19 and legal help to teachers and support workers at the school and connected community organisations.

Our Youth Outreach Lawyer, Libby, has also adapted the project to the new online environment by creating and posting legal education videos to an online page used by St Joseph's so that students can access the videos while remote learning.