About us
Who we are
Member organisations
- Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria
- Federation of Community Legal Centres
- Law Institute of Victoria
- Justice Connect
- The Victorian Bar
- Victoria Law Foundation
- Victoria Legal Aid
- Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service
VLAF's Main Forum executive is made up of representatives from each member organisation:
- Romesh Kumar, The Victorian Bar (Chair)
- Wayne Muir, Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (Deputy Chair)
- Mark Woods, Law Institute of Victoria
- Fiona Mcleay, Justice Connect
- Liana Buchanan, Federation of Community Legal Centres
- Bevan Warner, Victoria Legal Aid
- Joh Kirby, Victoria Law Foundation
- Antoinette Braybrook, Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria
VLAF staff: Tara Skinner, Acting VLAF Project Officer
Main Forum representatives meet quarterly to discuss issues of relevance to the legal assistance sector.
Terms of reference
Aims
The forum aims to:
- advocate for increased access to legal services for socially and economically disadvantaged people
- continuously improve service delivery models by providers of legal assistance services to be responsive to unmet legal needs.
Strategy
We will meet these aims by:
- fulfilling the sector’s need for a central point that collates information, commissions projects and research, explores ways to solve shared problems and for sector worker education
- encouraging organisations to take joint positions on issues of common interest, notably advocacy to state and federal governments for more resources for the sector
- facilitating networking and information sharing
- representing the sector in multi-sector collaboration
Principles of Cooperation
Forum member organisations will:
- respect each other's roles and acknowledge that these roles may lead to differences of opinion about particular issues
- recognise the independence of diversity of services and their approaches to legal service delivery
- where possible and practical, make open communication and consultation a priority, particularly where changes to policy or service delivery are considered or advocated
- be informed by a focus on real outcomes for disadvantaged people
- work by consensus in decision making and in promotion of VLAF activities whilst respecting the different roles of member organisations and their representatives.
Working Groups
All VLAF working groups will be established according to the following principles:
- be short term, time bound
- have a narrow task-focused terms of reference
- have clear mandates and clear deliverables
- be chaired by senior staff (EO or Director level) and membership will be at a senior level with content experts invited where appropriate
