BAF is a founding partner of this initiative. The Accessible Justice & Wellbeing Trust aims to tackle this in Taranaki by co-designing and piloting with health, welfare, legal and community organisations the integration of access to justice and wellbeing services.
Too few New Zealanders can truly access justice today. What’s more, we fail to help people with their wellbeing needs driving huge personal and societal costs – including for those most vulnerable, across business productivity and our health, social, justice and corrections budgets.
Not accessing justice affects many in their everyday lives through landlord, employment, family or other personal issues. Justice is inaccessible for many reasons: the cost with legal aid available for too few; a scary or culturally alien environment; or question of personal capacity (to organise documents, speak the lawyers language and more). Without justice, real personal and societal costs follow.
At the same time, many wanting legal support are under stress in other aspects of their lives with holistic help needed to prevent compounding issues. For instance, wellbeing issues may be impacting work performance or hours, and in turn ability to pay rent or feed family. In extreme but common cases things compound with drink, drugs, family violence or theft.
So that we act early to address people’s needs – especially the most excluded – avoiding the far higher costs to our public systems, businesses, families and communities we pay today
Delivering accessible justice and wellbeing services is a prudent investment that:
- cuts costs in stretched health, social, education, judicial and corrections budgets
- helps businesses through better productivity
- and cuts family and individual’s pain from poor health, loss of income/ work, stress, drink, drugs, violence and crime.
Building on our experience to date, we propose to start with pilots across three high impact areas
- Partnering to deliver accessible (first aid) legal clinics across the region
- Partnering with navigators to guide people through document, forms, agencies or institutions needed to access their civil legal rights and explore wellbeing connections/ referrals
- Stimulating a court-based support service to triage defendants where social issues are a key driver to risk of offending to support services alongside sentencing.