National Legal Aid commissioned independent, trauma-informed Jo Farmer Consulting to evaluate the With You project between February and April 2025. The purpose of the evaluation was to:
- determine the impacts of the With You project on legal assistance professionals and organisations to date
- identify the most effective training strategies used in the project for applying trauma-informed, rights-based practices in the legal assistance sector
- distil key project learnings to inform future implementation and broader systems change projects as appropriate.
Evaluation finds a substantial impact for individuals and services
The evaluators found that overall, the With You project has had a substantial impact on those in the legal assistance sector, at both an individual and organisational level. The components of the project have combined to address the capability and motivation of individual practitioners to implement trauma-informed practices, while also working with legal assistance organisations to value and enable this practice.
An important focus of the With You project has been recognising that practitioners cannot achieve change on their own – they must be working in enabling and supportive environments. Involving senior leadership in this process has been an important part of achieving organisational change and has allowed the project to achieve more change than would have occurred had the focus been solely on practice training.
This level of impact is particularly impressive given the sector’s starting point, the limited timeframe of the project, and the relatively low resourcing and staffing available for the project.
Rigorous evaluation approach
The evaluation used a mixed-methods approach drawing on eLearning data and in-person training feedback, 43 qualitative interviews with training participants in almost every state and territory, leaders of legal services, project stakeholders, the Project Board and With You team and other project data and documentation.