In 2019, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) working with its Corporate Advisory Committee (CAC) launched a new initiative tied to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 and its call to “ensure equal access to justice for all.” The initiative’s mandate was to identify more opportunities for the U.S. corporate community interested in advancing Goal 16 to strategically collaborate with NLADA’s members – civil legal aid offices, public defender offices, and clients across the country. This activity resulted in the publication of the NLADA Policy Brief: Access to Justice is Good for Business and launch of the CAC’s Goal 16 Working Group, which identifies access to justice policy issues that can be advanced through public-private partnership. The working group was successfully registered with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Partnerships Platform as the U.S. legal community’s commitment to Goal 16.
Working with NLADA’s experts, the working group considers access to justice policy issues that can be taken up by CAC members and peers together or by CAC members on their own. It also provides CAC members a place to share their own access to justice advocacy with other corporate leaders.
This toolkit spotlights this work. It sets out:
The strategies and examples included in the toolkit are drawn from the activity of the Goal 16 Working Group, as well as those of individual CAC members and other corporate champions taken outside of the working group. We know these examples can provide inspiration to other private sector actors interested in advancing justice for all.