Uplifting Victoria’s Community Legal Sector
Organisation: Consumer Action Law Centre
Role: Service Designer, Communication Designer
Year: 2025
How might we best support Victorians experiencing financial difficulty?
We redesigned the Worker Advice Line for Consumer Action Law Centre (CALC), a free legal advice service that pursues litigation on behalf of vulnerable and disadvantaged consumers across Victoria. This project is part of an organisation-wide uplift of CALC’s service lines and internal systems.
The Challenge
As a community legal centre, CALC is the largest specialist consumer legal practice in Australia. As well as working with consumers directly, CALC provides legal assistance and professional training to community workers who advocate on behalf of consumers.
Due to limited resourcing, CALC has recently prioritised their Worker Advice Line service in order to create the most impact, and support as many Victorians as possible.
However, the Worker Advice Line required a complete service redesign to meet the needs and circumstances of today.
Methodology
Meeting Workers where they’re at
We conducted six site visits to Financial Counselling agencies and Community Legal Centres across Victoria, to observe their environment, workflow and day-to-day experiences. These site visits were an invaluable opportunity to shadow client appointments, and conduct semi-structured interviews about their experiences with CALC, and how they could be improved.
Visualising the Sector
A vital part of this project was creating a data visualisation of Victoria’s Community Legal Sector by combining data. I combined data points from from FCVic , FCLC, ABS and CALC’S internal database to create a multi-layered, customisable map of Victoria’s Community Legal sector.
An animation of Data Visualisation in action
Co-designing our future
At the conclusion of this project, we delivered a co-design workshop to deliver insights and facilitate ideation going into the next stage of the service redesign. This was conducted using Miro, gameshow style, to encourage participation and generate interest in the work going forward.
Impact
These insights and recommendations have formed the foundation of CALC’s overall service redesign.
Furthermore, the data visualisation is the first of it’s kind, and has been shared with the wider Community Legal Sector to inform insights and future strategic planning. This project is part of an organisation-wide uplift of CALC’s service lines and internal systems.
“This is fabulous work and I can’t wait to dig into it, and see how our teams can use this for future planning”