Caxton Legal Centre Inc. aims to increase community awareness of the law through the use of media, education and publications. It is hoped that increased knowledge of legal rights and responsibilities will allow people to avoid legal problems or recognise those problems as soon as they arise.

The community legal education activities of the Centre include publications, running forums and conferences, visiting schools, training for our volunteers and talking to community groups and professional organisations.

Centre staff are available to visit your school and organisation to present seminars about the Centre's activities, the role of community legal centres generally or about specific areas of law. If you would like to organise a community legal education visit by our staff, please contact the Centre.

Training for Community Organisations

Caxton Legal Centre Inc. has a genuine commitment to providing service to other community organizations.  We publish the Incorporated Associations Manual and have for many years provided free legal advice to both representatives and members of a wide number of non profit incorporated associations – from welfare agencies through to small sporting and craft guilds.  We consider that providing legal assistance to such organisations is particularly important because this area of law is a specialist area and many of our clients are volunteers working with either unfunded or poorly funded organizations and have no capacity to pay for private legal advice.
For the last 10 years, we have also been providing regular free education programs to management committees of such associations about good governance.  In 2007, we provided this training on a monthly basis.  Caxton Legal Centre Inc. is committed to providing quality community legal education because we consider that prevention is better than cure.
Our training programs are designed to be run either as all day interactive workshops or as 1 hour presentations.  In particular, we provide:

• Training on privacy and confidentiality for people working in welfare/counselling and related services;
• Training around risk management and governance – including volunteer liability, insurance and volunteer training;
• Training about ‘how to incorporate’ an organization, and
• Training about duties and responsibilities of being on a management committee (including training about recent changes to the Associations Incorporation Act).

In previous years, our training program has been largely confined to the greater Brisbane area – including Redcliff through to Inala and Ipswich.  In 2007, we extended our management committee training program into regional areas to provide outreach training in partnership with the Toowoomba Advocacy and Support Service as part of the ‘Blueprint for the Bush’ initiative.  This involved a combination of both face to face and teleconferencing training and enabled us to provide training to communities in Stanthorpe, Chinchilla, Miles, Goondiwindi, Toowoomba, Tara, Dalby, St. George, Roma, Milmerran and Warwick, amongst others.

In 2008, we are hoping to continue to make our expertise available to similar organizations.  One of the unique aspects of our training is that our training is provided by lawyers and social workers who themselves actually work in community based organizations.  This gives us a unique insight into how community service organizations operate – especially in terms of funding compliance requirements, use of volunteers and how being under-resourced impacts on management and service delivery.

We do not normally charge for our training but welcome reimbursement for photocopying and travel costs from organizations that have some capacity to contribute in this way.  (A fee may be levied for larger organisations.)

(*Please note that we do not provide training about accounting, auditing or tax issues affecting community organizations.)