LawLink has had an interesting year so far. I have spent some months networking and building up contacts with various statutory and voluntary bodies across the county in order to establish a firm footing for future work. I have built links with the partnership board, the CLSP steering group, the various district and borough councils, day services and their users, the CABx, Victim Support and Witness Service, Dorset Police, solicitors’ firms, Mediation Dorset, Mencap and various other local and national organisations.

The project has a small but growing list of volunteer advocates who have registered their willingness to be called on for LawLink’s cases, which are generally short term and issues based. The sorts of cases that are coming in at the moment are around housing, personal finance and employment. People are asking for help to sort out a specific problem involving the law/rights in some way. In taking on these cases, we are learning a lot about the issues involved and building up a bank of knowledge and information for the office.

LawLink has recruited a team of four co-workers and we meet every Tuesday at a room in Weymouth. The team advise me on presentation of written material and help me to plan and deliver training sessions. Lorna Franklin, Cath Hopkinson, Pete Gregory and Rynn Jones are all valuable colleagues who are growing in confidence and skills each week.

We are in the process of producing a series of information leaflets to cover a range of rights issues in an easy to read format. They will then be developed into a series of video presentations. These will all be available online in the future. We have also visited several day centres around the county and delivered workshops on a variety of issues. The workshops seem to have gone down very well and are proving to be a good way of picking up cases as people who attend workshops sometimes then see how the law can be made to help them in their own situation. The first of what I hope will be a series of sessions for the police is due to take place in July, and other organisations are taking up training during August and thereafter.

Plans for the coming year focus on the production of information leaflets and videos as well as delivering training to as many groups of people with learning disabilities and as many key agencies as possible.