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Legal Empowerment 101: Combining the power of law with the power of people

 

Welcome to Legal Empowerment 101! We’re so excited that you’ve decided to start this journey with us.

This course draws on experience from across the Legal Empowerment Network to show how we, the Legal Empowerment Network, have found ways to address injustice by combining the power of law with the power of people. The course pulls together lessons from years of in-person learning events and case studies that show what’s possible when people impacted by injustice know, use, and shape the law.

What will you learn?

Over the four weeks of this course, you will be able to explore how  justice advocates use legal empowerment to create change. By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  • Describe what legal empowerment is and how it differs from other ways of making change
  • Be inspired by the exciting results created in multiple sectors
  • Identify three transformations of legal empowerment and moments of the legal empowerment cycle in other’s work
  • Draw from examples of legal empowerment around the world to consider how to address a problem faced in your community

Who is this course for?

This course is designed primarily for people seeking justice within their community or through their organization who want to learn about how others have achieved success by combining the power of law with the power of people. Learners may be experienced justice advocates who are new to legal empowerment or individuals who are new to the justice field overall. Seasoned practitioners may also benefit from hearing the country examples and the conceptual framing available in the course. The course is a relatively short overview that can provide a baseline for more detailed, rigorous conversations about techniques and topic areas. 

How long will the course take?

The course spans four weeks and will take about 10 hours to complete. A new lesson of the course will be made available every week, but you may navigate freely between sections at your own pace. Each lesson will have a few videos (usually between 5 to 10 minutes long) and suggested reading material. Throughout the course you’ll be able to check your understanding through quizzes. At the end of each section, you will have the opportunity to engage with other participants by posting reflections a discussion forum page. At the end of the four weeks we will invite participants to a zoom conversation to share what you’ve learned and tell us about what other types of courses you would like to see.

You will have access to complete the course at your own pace thru the end of July.

Tips and tricks to get the most out of the course

We know that our learners are accessing this course from around the world, often with minimal internet connection. We also know that most of our learners learned multiple languages before learning English (we hope to release this course in additional languages in the fall). As a result, we want to highlight the following:

    • Navigation. When navigating you may use the left side menu or the orange navigation buttons that appear below the content. There are topics within each lesson and quizzes attached to most topics. This guide contains some screenshots to help. If you want to track your progress, you can click the green “mark as complete” in the top right for each topic.
    • Transcripts for most of the videos are available for download on the page of the video.
    • Captioning. Most videos already have subtitles. For those that don’t you can turn on captions by clicking the “CC” button on the bottom right of the videos or the tool icon in the same location.
    • Reading materials for each lesson are available on the lesson page, or you can download all the course readings and transcripts in one file here.
    • Engage! You are more likely to retain your learning if you apply it to what you are experiencing and connect with others. Engaging on the discussion board is a concrete way to deepen your learning

If you run into technical troubles along the way, please let us know at community@namati.org.

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