A statement from the Access to Justice Foundation’s Joint CEOs Clare Carter and Ruth Daniel marking International Women’s Day:
“This International Women’s Day, here at the Access to Justice Foundation, we are proud of all the Foundation has been able to achieve in providing and allocating essential funding to the many free legal advice charities who support some of the most marginalised women up and down the UK.
In the last quarter of 2021, our LSLIP partnerships alone supported over 3,000 women with free legal advice interventions that helped them overcome numerous issues around employment, housing, and family law, amongst others such as welfare benefits, domestic violence, and discrimination. It is inspiring to think about this impact, and that so many women’s lives were improved and, in some cases, may well have been saved.
We are conscious however, that there is still much work to be done, and we plan to continue working with our colleagues and partners in across the legal, public, private, and voluntary sectors to ensure that we can keep fundraising and do even more going forward.
As part of our efforts to drive change, we are proud to continue to work together with so many formidable female leaders and partners both within and outside the UK through the Network for Justice International Working Group.
These include Katherine Alteneder from the Self-Represented Litigation Network in the United States, our colleagues from Canada Dayna Cornwall and Lisa Moore from the National Self-Represented Litigants Project and Canadian Forum on Civil Justice respectively, Cecilia Forrestal of the Community Action Network in Ireland, and Ursula O’Hare from the Law Centre Northern Ireland.
Internally we continue to strive to ensure that our organisational culture remains a supportive, accommodating and nurturing working environment for women of every background and experience.
We plan to build on our many successes over the next year and hope to continue making a difference to the lives of thousands more women nationwide and beyond.”
