When you think of professions in the Not-For-Profit sector, Solicitors and Legal Practitioners are not the first people that come to mind.
Yet there are Solicitors leaving CBD high rise offices and turning to more grass-roots work.

For example, The Advocacy and Support Centre (TASC) recently advertised for a Legal Practitioner to operate from Ipswich and Toowoomba.
TASC is an organisation that pursues social justice for marginalised people within the community, particularly those located in remote southeast/southwest Queensland. As well as requiring a candidate with the usual legal qualifications such as a current Practicing Certificate in Queensland, TASC was seeking a special kind of individual to take up this challenge.

For TASC, it was very important for the successful applicant to possess a strong social conscience and be passionate about providing high quality legal services to disadvantaged people.

Other community organisations recruiting Solicitors have included the North Queensland Women’s Legal Service who have hired legal professionals to specialise in areas that particularly affect women, including Family Law, Family & Domestic Violence, Child Protection and miscellaneous civil and criminal matters.

In addition, The Cape York Family Violence Prevention Legal Unit put the call out for a Solicitor to join their team. In this role, the successful applicant was required to provide quality legal advice, representation, and referral to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients on legal matters.

Community-minded Solicitors are a far from rare phenomenon, as evidenced by the scattering of some 200 Community Legal Centres (CLCs) throughout Australia, with about 20 of these staffed entirely by volunteers.
A number of CLCs specialise in services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, children, young people, refugees, the homeless and other groups.

The ideological gap between community organisations and the legal fraternity is clearly not as wide as some may think, and the crossovers mentioned above are just some examples of NFP’s making productive and progressive use of professionals versed in law.