Increase Public Understanding

An online education service for Small and Local Charities

Grant: £30,000
November 9, 2016

This project provides a National Programme for Legal Property education to the Not-for-Profit sector, through an online education service, to increase understanding of property law to reduce property costs, risks and worry and enable organisations to focus on vital frontline work.

Patients' Rights Care Pathway

Grant: £15,000
November 9, 2016

Individuals admitted to hospital with a mental illness, informally or detained, are often unaware of their human rights and rights under mental health law. An infographic patients’ rights care pathway for adult acute psychiatric care is being developed. A report evaluating this and highlighting good practice using the pathway will be published. This will support staff to recognise critical points to ensure patients are informed about and afforded specific rights.

Consultation involving service users, carers and staff has provided a wealth of information to help formulate a pathway identifying key rights from admission to discharge.

This funding is to produce short videos to promote systems and behavioural change in acute wards. The videos will be widely available via the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland website and partner organisations. Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland will also promote their use direct to staff during their regular visits to acute wards across Scotland.

Use of the law by voluntary Organisations Phase 2

Grant: £200,000
October 5, 2016

This project is to support the Strengthening the Voluntary Sector (STVS) awards programme. The focus chosen for the new five-year programme is building on a belief that better use of the law presents opportunities for parts of the voluntary sector to enhance their ability to pursue their charitable purpose. In turn, better use of the law by the voluntary sector will help to amplify the law’s everyday relevance by situating it within a wider framework advocacy and social change. It also offers opportunities to unlock new sources of financial and other support for legal-related activity and to widen ownership and defence of the law.

Outside the legal voluntary sector, engagement by voluntary organisations in the law is mixed. The law has not assumed a central place in the thinking of voluntary organisations otherwise involved in individual advocacy or the pursuit of wider change. Strategic engagement and collaboration between the legal and voluntary sectors is also rare.

All Party Parliamentary Groups

Grant: £33,810
July 6, 2016

A project to provide a Secretariat and support service for the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Public Legal Education (PLE) and the group on Pro Bono, operate a shared resource with the APPG on Pro Bono, and work in tandem with the Civil Justice Council’s Task Group on PLE.

Raising Awareness of Legal Aid (APPG Plus)

Grant: £53,596
July 6, 2016

This grant will fund the secretariat of The APPG on Legal Aid which is a cross‐party group that aims to promote parliamentary and public discussion of legal aid.

The project will have two primary purposes:

1. To maintain the work of the APPG in providing a forum for the discussion and scrutiny of legal aid issues in Parliament. This will raise the profile of legal aid within Parliament by:
   • Maintaining the current cycle of regular APPG meetings and producing and disseminating minutes, briefings and reports from those meetings.
   • Maintaining and improving the APPG website.
2. To extend the reach of the APPG by providing LAPG with the capacity to improve understanding of the legal aid system and the availability of legal aid to MPs and Councillors across England and Wales. This will improve public understanding of and access to legal aid by:
   1. Engaging directly with MPs and Councillors and, crucially, their support and casework staff, to ensure they understand
      • what types of legal problems are covered by legal aid,
      • who qualifies for legal aid and
      • how members of the public access the system including e.g. financial evidence needed at the first interview.
   2. Keeping MPs, Councillors and their support staff aware of important developments in legal aid where those developments affect the issues outlined in (a) above.

LAG Business Planning

Grant: £16,760
May 6, 2016

The charity is operating on a break-even basis with no reserves to invest in updated software and other business critical infrastructure. The project is to cover the costs of consultants to advise LAG on the drafting and implementation of a business plan to secure its future as a sustainable social enterprise.

The first task of the consultants is to evaluate whether the charity is a going concern and to set out the options to sustain its legal information mission.

The business planning process will include-

• Suggesting possible sources of new revenue and necessary investment to sustain LAG’s publishing operation,
• A review of LAG’s production processes to make recommendations on efficiencies and other savings,
• Evaluating and making recommendations on LAG’s digital publishing strategy.

Get Legal Small Charity Overlay

Grant: £71,500
November 10, 2015

BWB has just soft launched a new On-Line service “BWB Get Legal” (getlegal.bwbllp.com) aimed at the charity sector, which produces bespoke legal and policy documents in response to the user answering document specific questions.

This project is to fund an overlay on BWB Get Legal to meet the specific needs of the smaller charities – where they do not even know what they need - and provide a seamless and very low cost method of meeting those small charity legal needs.

Community Portal – Serving and Connecting Small Charity’s Legal Information and Service Needs

Grant: £50,460
November 10, 2015

This project will provide a scalable and sustainable digital solution to the problem of small charities finding and getting access to legal support, services and people. It will also provide a way for the legal support sector to better connect with small charities and the people running them in a cost-effective and collaborative way. It will take existing online resources from a static to interactive digital solution and create the efficiencies in order for us to deliver relevant legal information to more small charities.

The new solution will be built on the cloud-based Salesforce CRM, software.

Free Online Legal Health Check Self-Assessment For NGOs

Grant: £19,600
November 10, 2015

This project gives NGOs a free, easy-to-use online tool to assess their legal needs, resulting in a report that they can work through with lawyers over time, whether on a fee-paying or pro bono basis. This will help NGOs to use lawyers more effectively and efficiently, being clear about exactly what they need to address and preventing costly disputes from arising by identifying the gaps in their standard operations and programmes.

It will also generate a body of knowledge about the needs and challenges of NGOs, creating the evidence required to generate policy and legislative reform.

Voluntary Sector Legal Information Audit

Grant: £12,950
November 10, 2015

The overall aim of this project is to create a record of the areas and topics where voluntary sector organisations require legal information and to audit where such information currently exists and where the gaps fall. We will cover the full lifecycle of a voluntary organisation from set up, to running the organisation, to winding up.

There is a current lack of coordination of up to date and reliable content in some topic areas as well as a complete absence of material in others. The focus will be on the availability of free legal information.

The long term intention is to use the Voluntary Sector Legal Information Audit to inform the creation of a coordinated online information resource for the sector and our members, in collaboration with other providers. The online resource will provide or signpost voluntary sector organisations to the up to date legal information they need. It will also draw on any partner resources and initiatives, where appropriate. At this stage anticipated partners for the next stage of this project will include BWB LLP, Small Charities Coalition and LawWorks.