This launch marks a new partnership between Kimberley Community Legal Services and the ANU through which KCLS aims to substantially innovate and extend civil law legal help for Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. The hope is that this will enable and position KCLS to manifest breakthrough legal service models based on long-term relationships with clients, working from client vantage points, in furtherance of client goals.

This effort involves normative, empirical, and critical dimensions that will challenge, engage, and benefit both KCLS and the ANU. The University's social justice ethos permeates research, scholarship, teaching, learning, and practice in law and many other fields. Learning and sharing sit at the centre of this collaboration, which is spanning great distances geographically, culturally, conceptually.

The collaboration is an initiative of the ANU Law Reform and Social Justice Program supported the College Reconciliation Action Plan. Other supporters include key staff and committees within the College, the ANU Law Internships Program, the ANU Legal Workshop and the ANU Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice. While driven on the ANU side by the ANU College of Law, it is hoped that the partnership will lead to a blossoming of ANU wide, multi-disciplinary relationships and act as a model for other expanded collaborations.

Speakers

Launch and discussion panel featuring:

• Anne Martin, Director of the Tjabal Centre and Ruth Abdullah, Senior Indigenous Liaison, Kimberley Community Legal Service
• Professor Brian P. Schmidt AC, ANU Vice Chancellor
• Senator Patrick Dodson
• Sarouche Razi, Principal Solicitor, Kimberley Community Legal Service
• Professor Stephen Bottomley, Dean ANU College of Law
• Professor Kim Rubenstein, Chair, ANU College of Law Reconciliation Action Plan Committee
• Associate Professor Asmi Wood
• Associate Professor Janet Hunt, Deputy Director, ANU Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research

This event will be publicly live streamed from the ANU TV channel on Youtube.
This event will also be video recorded and made available from this page soon after the event.
 

* White Ribbon Day and the 'Blanket of Healing'
KCLS staff joined with women from the community to do a blanket, with messages about non-violence on square shaped materials. The messages were about safety from family violence and the world you want to live in. We decided to call it the 'Blanket of Strength and Healing'. A morning tea for women was held on 18 Nov 2011, at the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language Centre.
The blanket was first displayed at a community event at White Gum Park on the Friday 25 Nov, when young and old men from the Young Men’s and Bringing Them Home programs put up a display board with photos and messages against violence.
A community event was also held in Halls Creek on Wednesday 23 Nov 2011, where Bev Russ and Tanya Norman coordinated the display of the blanket and gathered more paintings. The Hall’s Creek materials were then brought back to Kununurra to make the blanket as a whole for the East Kimberley. The 'Blanket of Healing' is now displayed in the KCLS office.