Image: SuppliedThe second series of the University of the Western Cape Law Faculty’s community engagement videos was recently launched, focusing on a new set of issues to aid and inform underserved communities.
The 13 videos in the “Know Your Rights” series deal with a range of topics which include the rights of the disabled, corruption, copyright, indigenous knowledge, unfair discrimination, social grants, trademark protection, housing rights, patents and inventions, basic service delivery, customary marriages, contract law, and financial technology.
The videos are available on YouTube and will also be distributed through community organisations.
Law Faculty Teaching and Learning Specialist, Dr Conrad Potberg, speaking at the launch of the latest series, said UWC's mission has three pillars: research, learning and teaching, and community engagement.
Dr Potberg said community engagement is a two-way street. “It’s not a one-way where there’s only the servicing of a community, but also the expert or the specialist, in this case, the legal specialist, who also learns from this process and what they can apply in the classroom,” said Dr Potberg.
This video series, like the first season, was directed by filmmaker, Dr Jacob Cloete and produced by the law faculty’s community engagement coordinator, Cherith Sanger. Sanger said she was surprised by the reception of the first season, which “went very, very well”.
The inaugural season featured a series of radio interviews with the faculty's legal specialists, broadcast on one of the Western Cape's largest commercial radio stations. “It really became bigger than I actually thought it would. It has also been shared on a variety of channels,” said Sanger.
The only issue with the videos, she said, is that they could become outdated if the law changes, but added that the specialists discuss the topics in a general way, which allows for possible future changes.
Sanger said a lot of her interest in community engagement stems from understanding and working with ordinary people, particularly the indigent. Combine this with the fact that while the law faculty has all the relevant experts, access to justice and legal information is not readily accessible to ordinary people.
She emphasised that the community engagement project is not intended to provide legal advice. Its purpose is not to substitute the attorney/client relationship, in which advice is customised for specific situations.
Chirstone Hornsby, stakeholder engagement officer for the Wine and Agriculture Ethical Trade Association (Wieta), and a partner on the projects, said while there is a knowledge gap, it is at the transfer of knowledge stage where there is a bottleneck.
Wieta is a multi-stakeholder organisation, consisting of farmers, producers, trade unions, and sellers, responsible for assuring there aren’t any abuses in the industry, like unfair dismissal and forcible evictions.
With over 1400 members, Hornsby said Wieta has 13 principles which govern the organisation to ensure fairness. “Our 13 principles consist of housing, occupational health and safety, on-site labour law - all of these form part and parcel of the ‘Wieta standard’, which is a regulatory framework for us - to safeguard farms, farmworkers on site, and also community development, which are also important,” said Hornsby.
He said after the Wieta executive saw the first season of the “Know Your Rights” series, there were three areas they identified as quite important: Evictions, undocumented workers, and domestic violence.
“We thought that speaks quite nicely to some of the work that we do. So what we've done is actually created digital posters. We’ll be sharing it on our socials, with a QR code, which people can access.
“So we are going to print some of those posters and then share them with the farm workers so that they have that knowledge transfer, and they can watch the videos at their own leisure, because a lot of these farms have WiFi. There’s access to WiFi, but not access to knowledge or legal aid,” said Hornsby.
