Community Lawyering – Spring 2025

Course Overview

How can we effectively advocate for the communities we serve if we don’t work alongside them?

Move beyond your role as a legal aid lawyer and see yourself as a community catalyst, trusted advisor, and partner. The Shriver Center’s Community Lawyering training brings a new mindset to equal justice advocacy and provides concrete steps to build and sustain strong relationships among community members.

You’ll learn how to activate issues identified by the community, lead a successful advocacy and media campaign, and facilitate community leadership. We’ll share real-life examples from groups across the country. You can even organize this course in conjunction with your local community leaders and create a relationship building exercise. Working together, we can achieve real change.

Participants will learn how to:

• Activate community-identified issues by helping groups build relationships, and develop and sustain good processes for making decisions and working together.
• Facilitate community leadership and help community groups build power.
• Drive effective policy advocacy in support of community-led initiatives.
• Leverage strategic communications to shift the narrative around issues affecting the community.
• Use litigation and leverage individual cases into systemic impact and real change for communities of color and clients with low income.