Stand Beside Him in Court - The McKenzie Friend Corps

A family courtroom is a language exam conducted at speed, in public, about your children, and most men sit it alone. Legal aid is a memory; a solicitor is £250 an hour; and so the litigant-in-person becomes the courtroom's default man - mis-hearing procedures, mis-filing forms, agreeing in panic to things he does not understand and will spend years trying to un-agree. The single cheapest intervention in the whole process is a calm, trained person in the next chair. A McKenzie Friend cannot address the court, but can do nearly everything else: prepare the statement, organise the bundle, take notes at speed, whisper the procedure, and stand between the man and his worst impulses in the corridor. This fund trains and deploys volunteer McKenzie Friends - men and women, many of them veterans of their own cases - for men who cannot pay. Each £10 entry funds one volunteer's court-day travel pack: fares, printing, bundle and the hour of pre-hearing prep. Tonight's target: thirty court days funded across the North West and London in December. At the session we run a live mock directions hearing (audience plays the bench), a volunteer describes the corridor moment that decides most hearings, and we open the deployment board - thirty seats, thirty names, one chair at a time. He should not sit alone. Nobody should sit alone.

Price: £10.00

Location: London

Published by Gilbert Johnson on OmniList.