Looking back and looking forward
For more than 20 years, West Coast LEAF has offered legal education workshops across BC, on topics ranging from consent to family law. We have also collaborated with other organizations to publish and distribute educational materials about the law, like Is That Legal?, our multilingual youth guide to online violence and harassment, which reached about 7,000 people between April 2019 and March 2020.
There have been many changes since West Coast LEAF first began offering public legal education and information (PLEI), both in our organization and in society. We’ve expanded our organizational mandate to embrace a more inclusive understanding of gender justice. We have also made commitments to decolonizing—an ongoing process, and a particularly complicated one for an organization that uses the colonial legal system to make change.
Our current staff team has inherited a suite of workshops and other PLEI methods and tools, some of which were first developed in the 1990s. As we celebrate West Coast LEAF’s 35th birthday, we’re incredibly grateful for the past work of the feminists who built our PLEI program—and we recognize it’s time to do a thoughtful evaluation to chart our path forward.
What is the Re-Envisioning PLEI Project?
The Re-Envisioning PLEI Project is an opportunity for us to conduct research and invite input from our community to ensure that our PLEI programming meets their needs.
We’ve researched best practices for critical PLEI that recognizes the limitations and harms of the colonial legal system. We have also spoken with community members to learn more about what they want from PLEI moving forward.
Our goal is to provide relevant, concrete legal information that helps people make informed choices in challenging situations, such as workplace discrimination. By the end of the Re-Envisioning PLEI Project, we’ll have developed a pathway to guide our future PLEI, rooted in the feedback gathered during our community engagement process.
Our report
In October, 2021, we were proud to release our Re-Envisioning PLEI report, pulling together our biggest learnings from our year of community conversations and research.
Download the Executive Summary.
Our online workshop
On Tuesday, November 30, 2021 from 12:30 to 2 pm Pacific Time, we offered a free online workshop on Re-Envisioning PLEI! Please stay tuned for the recording. Thank you to our generous partners at Courthouse Libraries BC and Clicklaw for working with us to offer this learning opportunity.
Get in touch
Do you have feedback about our PLEI, or would you like to learn more about the project? Please contact Cecile Afable (Youth Workshop Coordinator), at youth [at] westcoastleaf [dot] org.
Or if you have insights to share about our report, we hope you will fill out our online feedback form to share comments, ask questions, and/or let us know what you think of our report and how you plan to use it.
This project is made possible by generous funding from
