Engagement objective

International Justice Mission (IJM) has been working with children and government bodies in India for the last 23 years. As part of its work in the past few years IJM has been working with vulnerable communities to enhance their engagement with the government systems and law enforcement agencies. In Turbhe, Maharashtra, IJM worked on creating linkages between vulnerable communities and the criminal justice system.

StratComm was tasked with consolidating the learnings from the project and developing a guide for how the community engagement approach can be used to link different vulnerable communities with the criminal justice system.

The toolkit will allow IJM to replicate its learnings and scale up their efforts. Through this toolkit they will be able to help vulnerable communities engage better with the criminal justice systems in other locations across India.

Key outcome

The Building Bridge Toolkit provides detailed step by step guidance on building community engagement with a view to strengthen the linkages between vulnerable communities and the criminal justice systems. It provides cases from IJM’s work on bonded labour and trafficking as well as illustrative examples of working on themes such as domestic violence.

The toolkit was released jointly by IJM and the Maharashtra State Commission for Women and is now being used to support the amplification of voices of vulnerable communities and increase their engagement with government systems to access their rights.