Time is precious – yours and mine.

I’m quite sure you would rather I was doing what I do best, providing legal advice and support to Tasmanian women who have nowhere else to turn.

Sadly community legal service funding isn’t just under threat, it’s been cut to the tune of $19.6 million, with an additional $6 million in cuts to come.

Our Service alone will lose at least $100,000.00 per year as at 1st July 2015. If we can’t find alternate funding, jobs will be lost and services cut.

Can you help get me back to work and helping those who need it most?

My name is Susan Fahey.  I’m the CEO and Principal Solicitor at the Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, where we help several thousand Tasmanian women each year who have no one else to turn to for legal advice, assistance and information.

The Women’s Legal Service provides a vital free service to disadvantaged Tasmanian women.

Women, especially those on low incomes, face significant barriers to accessing legal services. Without our specialised and expert assistance and emphasis on early intervention, thousands of Tasmanian women would go without help, creating a distinct and potentially costly disadvantage that is no fault of their own.

We receive no financial assistance from the State Government making us wholly dependent on Commonwealth funding and any additional grants we can obtain, so your help is essential.

If we are to continue to provide our services and assist women to navigate the tangled web of our legal system, we must raise at least the equivalent of the $100,000.00 funding that is to be cut from our budget.

This will ensure we continue to operate as we do today, with no cuts to services when the Federal Budget cuts come into effect.

How can your donation support the work of the Women’s Legal Service?

•     A gift of $50.00 can provide a woman with face to face advice for an hour and a gift of $100.00 can provide a young mums group with a two hour workshop on healthy legal habits.
•     A significant gift of $250.00 will pay for the equivalent of preparing a Family Violence Order for a woman and children who are threatened with domestic violence.
•     A generous gift of $500.00 today will provide the funds required to prepare for and support one woman in Family Court for a day.
•     An exceptional gift of $1,000.00 will allow us to continue to run our free legal advice helpline that assists women to access the services most appropriate to their needs for a week.

Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated – be it $2.00 or $2,000.00 – to help us keep doing what we do best: helping Tasmania’s most disadvantaged women.

When I started working with Women’s Legal Service in 2002 we provided limited assistance to a few hundred women and children each year.

We now assist several thousand women and children each year, answer many hundreds of calls through our legal advice helpline, provide legal education to professionals and the public alike, and maintain our award winning and soon to be national app “Girls Gotta Know” which gives young women clear, accessible information about their legal rights in all areas of their lives.

Our service runs on the sniff of an oily rag as it is. We have very limited administrative support. Comparatively, our wages are not high. We are brilliant value for money with an output far higher than the input received. We stop little problems from becoming big ones.

We simply cannot risk losing our service in the name of idealogical budget balancing.

I hope you will join me in contributing to our target of $100,000.00 for this critical service.

Yours sincerely

Susan

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Help us help all women across Tasmania.

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Alternatively, you can make a Direct Deposit using the following details.

Account Name: Women’s Legal Service Tasmania
BSB: 633 000  Account Number: 126462787
Swift Code: BENDAU3B
If you prefer, you can send us a cheque.

Our postal address is PO Box 707, North Hobart, 7002.

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