Outreach
For many people, the only way they can access the help they need is by community lawyers and social workers driving hours to their remote communities to see them face-to-face.
A lot of time on the road
Many clients of regional and remote community legal centres don’t have reliable access to a car, or even a mobile phone. Often, the only way people access support is by community lawyers and social workers driving hours to their remote communities to see them face-to-face.
Most community legal centres provide services across a very large geographic catchment area, with some making regular road trips of hundreds of kilometres to provide outreach services to the most remote communities, including remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Workers can spend six or more hours driving to, carrying out, and travelling home from, a single client meeting. For outreach to communities more than a few hours away, community legal workers have to stay overnight, or for several nights, away from home.
Long distances between remote communities can be exacerbated by poor road maintenance, making journeys more difficult than they need to be. Many regional and remote community legal centres need to have and maintain four-wheel-drive cars.
At some centres, all lawyers, social workers, community education workers and others that go on outreach have to do special off-road driving training because the communities they serve are only accessible via unfinished roads.
Building trust in remote communities
Working with people in remote communities requires time to build trust. It’s unfortunately all too common for organisations, including government agencies, to visit a remote community once or twice, making promises to help, but then not come back again.
Community legal centres serving these communities know they might need to spend months demonstrating regular on-the-ground presence, showing up when and where they say they will, before people will start trusting them with their problems.
When a centre first starts providing outreach to a community they haven’t been to before, workers might do several outreach trips in a row with very few people coming to speak with them. These repeated, reliable outreaches are crucially important to building the trust that will make people feel safe seeking help in future.
Funding models aren't fit for purpose
Community legal centres travel a combined 1.26 million kilometres a year to provide services to people in regional and remote communities. That’s far enough to travel between Earth and the moon 3.3 times.
Centres often have to budget for four-wheel-drives, petrol, off-road driving and bush first aid training, accommodation, and sometimes flights for workers to travel to very remote communities in their catchment area. Communications infrastructure can be patchy in regional and remote areas, so some centres have to invest in satellite phones. This is all part of necessary spending to deliver effective services to people in regional and remote areas.
Centres have to budget significantly more staff time to account for the extra time needed to build trust and provide effective services to people in regional and remote communities. It’s often unsafe to send one worker alone on long drives in the bush, so centres will generally send at least two workers on every outreach, which also increases the time-cost to the centre.
The National Access to Justice Partnership (NAJP), the main funding source for the community legal sector, does not reflect the significantly higher costs of delivering services, or heightened legal and related need, in regional and remote communities.