This month I started work on our new
dissemination project, Evidence into Practice, funded by Comic Relief and
focusing particularly on reaching legal professionals with CSEL's psychological
research findings. The project will run for three years, and will have a
similar structure to the Women's Research Dissemination project: as before
we'll be running 2-3 training sessions each year, publishing articles in
relevant journals, delivering conference presentations, and developing CSEL's
overall dissemination capacity in order to reach more legal professionals than
we can reach directly through our training.
Evidence into Practice will also feature some
exciting new plans and ways of working:
·
We will focus more particularly on legal
professionals than we have before, with a commitment to in-house training for
lawyers, as well as training for legal workers (including potentially
caseworkers) in the voluntary sector.
·
Our commitments also include dedicated follow-up
sessions for training participants to support ongoing use of CSEL's research
findings.
·
The project will develop our communications
infrastructure and capacity – we'll be recruiting a communications intern later
this year (watch this space!)
·
Further down the line we'll be organising a forum
or roundtable event to explore the involvement of refugee women in research
into refugee women's issues, looking at the ethics and practicalities of
participation and involvement.
At the moment, I'm in the research phase: talking
to lawyers and caseworkers about what information they need from CSEL and how
to deliver it to make it most useful; finding out more about the legal services
available to women seeking asylum and who's providing them; re-evaluating our
existing training. Phase 2 will involve designing the project's training
seminar, and planning the delivery of the project over the next 3 years.
Hopefully the first training seminar will be delivered in early summer.
Are you a lawyer or caseworker working with women
seeking asylum? If so, I'd love to hear from you: I'm looking for suggestions
as to law firms, law centres, and regions of the UK where we can take our
training, and suggestions as to essential content to include in the training –
or, indeed, non-essential content we can discard from training seminars! If
you'd be willing to be contacted as part of my project research and planning,
please get in touch with me.
Meanwhile, don't forget you can download our
current training manual with summaries of some of our research from our website.
Clare Cochrane
Evidence into Practice project manager
