The Jeanie Project – Ground-breaking technology will help food banks and community groups and provide access to the law for poor and vulnerable people.

We believe that anyone who needs legal advice should be able to access it – no matter what their background or income might be.

The problem

Government cuts to Legal Aid means that more and more people – the poor and vulnerable especially – are unable to access the support and legal advice that they need. Relatively simple issues quickly become overwhelming, thanks to the lack of the necessary information and appropriate support. The consequences of this can wreck lives and families, from being illegally evicted for rent arrears (Maria), discriminated out of a job (Jordan), or even removed from the country (Adnan).

The solution

There is a way to make access to legal advice more fair and equal – and it’s beautifully simple. But we need your help.

The Jeanie Project will use front-line legal experience and groundbreaking technology provided by KIM (Knowledge, Intelligence, Meaning). KIM was developed by Riverviewlaw and is provided under licence for free. Through the technology of simple-to-use online information and tools, we can help hundreds of groups in local communities to access advice, information and connections to lawyers, simply and effectively. This service will be completely free.

The project pilot will involve Toynbee Hall, a well established advice service in the East End of London. It will begin with immigration though other scenarios involving areas of ‘poverty’ or ‘social welfare’ law – including debt, housing, employment as well as family – have been developed. We hope it will then expand into MPs surgeries and other civil society organisations such as foodbanks.

How you can help

We need to test the technology and processes with the community groups who are on this early journey with us. We need to make sure it works smoothly for them and the people they help. The quicker we can do this do this quicker we can share the KIM technology with more organisations that can help.

We have been given a generous grant by the Legal Education Foundation but need more. Our target figure of £7,500 will enable us to work with our current partners over the next few months and to put everything through its paces in the community, ready for our launch early in 2019.

If 150 people contribute £50 then we can do this! The more you give, the more we can do.

We didn’t think it was fair to ask you to invest in something we hadn’t done so ourselves – so we have made the first donations. We’re also contributing our time for free.

We now until have August the 9^th 2018, 8.00am to raise the funds needed. If we don’t reach our target then we don’t receive any money and more and more people will go without help. Any surplus we raise will go into bringing more partners on board.

Please donate now – and ask other people you know who care about fairness and justice to do the same and to share our message.

The future 

If The Jeanie Project is as successful as we believe it will be then we can transform access to legal advice and support in this country. We are hugely excited to be part of that. We look forward to welcoming you too.

Lucy, Richard and Martin