Sara Golru

When starting my volunteering at Redfern Legal Centre (RLC), I initially knew very little about the Centre. However, my volunteer work reading through the countless achievements in RLC’s Annual Reports (1977-2014) and selecting accomplishments to display on a Historical Achievements webpage filled me with much passion and pride in RLC’s successes. I was requested by RLC to create this webpage in order to reformulate their core message in a way that resonates with the ordinary reader and prospective donor. Thus, I saw this project as the perfect opportunity to recreate the esteem I had discovered for RLC by instilling this admiration within the broader public. With RLC facing major cuts in government funding, they require more support now than ever before. Consequently, I have aimed to display RLC’s accomplishments in a way that would hopefully highlight to the average reader that RLC is an organization worth supporting.

The goal of this project can be summed up in the question,

‘what does RLC’s history reveal about the impact it has had on local and international communities?’

The webpage ultimately aims to demonstrate the undoubtedly positive historical impact of RLC, for example representing Mardi Gras participants in 1978 to raising over $16,000 for the Legal Aid Centre in Aceh in 2005 to implementing Domestic and Family Violence Reforms in 2014. Reading the long list of RLC’s major achievements should enlighten the reader to the fact that RLC has not only played a prominent role in the local sphere through their community education programs and casework but also a significant role in the international arena through their global fundraising and activism.

The detailed outline of accomplishments draws predominantly from a few key primary and secondary sources. In selecting the relevant content, I drew from the wealth of achievements demonstrated in RLC’s Annual Reports from 1977 to 2014. [1]  Moreover, some digging through the Annual Reports and Trove led me to conduct further research into NSW Hansard Reports dating from 1979 to 2015. The discovery of highly praiseworthy comments towards RLC in these reports prompted me to include extracts of these comments in my project in the text boxes entitled ‘Parliamentary recognition of RLC’s social justice efforts’. [2] More generally, for the structure, writing style and formatting of the page, I relied heavily on the captivating and thought-provoking American Civil Liberties Union Accomplishments webpage[3] which RLC provided as an exemplar webpage. Also, the images scattered throughout the webpage were each carefully selected from RLC’s Annual Reports and RLC’s Facebook page in order to complement the written description of major achievements with a visual aid.

The inclusion of these photos, the Case Studies and the Parliamentary Comments ultimately aimed to provide a friendlier, more interactive and engaging depiction of RLC’s history instead of simply providing cold, hard facts in the manner of a detached researcher. The inspiration for this more interactive writing style and structure arose from my reading of Kathleen Mclean’s article, ‘Whose Questions, Whose Conversations?’ which prompted me to keep in mind the audience that this project will be addressing and to encourage active discussion rather than merely feed the passive reader information.[4]

In creating this project, I also strongly focused on ensuring the formatting and colour scheme of the webpage closely reflected that of RLC’s website, such as their incorporation of orange and blue text.[5] This was done in order to maintain uniformity and prevent the webpage seeming out of place in the broader context of the website.

Moreover, it must be noted that the target audience for this project primarily involves those who continue to rely on RLC’s services. This not only encompasses the communities who benefit from RLC’s free legal services but also the wider local and international population who benefit from the Centre’s highly effective and widespread advocacy, their production of helpful legal guides, regular media statements and so much more. Thus, the population that RLC strives to assist and the people that can donate to the Centre encompass all demographics. By presenting this list of accomplishments on RLC’s website, this project aims to serve the need to ensure fundraising for the Centre from the widest possible audience so that the broader community can continue to benefit from the Centre’s services.

As a final note, the webpage provided in this project was only recently uploaded onto RLC’s website, namely on the 19/11/2015. Now that the webpage is uploaded, we aim that the public will be notified about its inclusion on the website through RLC’s bi-monthly ebulletin and various social media pages on Twitter and Facebook.

— SARA GOLRU 

NOTES

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[1] Redfern Legal Centre, Annual Report (Redfern: Redfern Legal Centre, 1977-2014).

[2] For the full reports, please see: New South Wales, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 21 March 1979, p. 2962; New South Wales, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 18 April 1979, p. 4547; New South Wales, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 19 April 1979, p. 4712.

[3] American Civil Liberties Union, Accomplishments, 2015, viewed 2/10/2015.

[4] Kathleen Mclean, ‘Whose Questions, Whose Conversations’, in Bill Adair et al., eds., Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (Philadelphia: Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage, 2011), pp. 70-79.

[5] Redfern Legal Centre, Welcome, 2013, viewed 10/08/2015.

Sara Golru, "Redfern Legal Centre's Historical Accomplishments," History Matters, (20 October 2015).