Sustainability allies: pro bono support for KIND

Meet Ravi Randhawa, legal director in our Public Administrative Law team and one of our pro bono volunteers. In this, the next in our ‘sustainability allies’ blog series, we talk to Ravi about her pro bono work as part of supporting the Kids in Need of Defense programme. Pro bono is an important element of our overall ESG strategy, which focuses on four priorities: corporate governance; people, inclusion and wellbeing; environment; and responsible business.

Over this series we will look at the impact the firm is having across all its ESG priorities through the eyes of our people – turning a spotlight on the fantastic work they are doing to help others and push forward our ESG goals.

To find out more about our ESG initiatives, take a look at our Sustainability report 2023.

Your name and role at Gowling WLG:

Ravi Randhawa, legal director, Public Law & Regulation team, Gowling WLG.

Tell us about the responsible business initiative you support…

We work with Central England Law Centre and the Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) programme to help provide free legal advice to undocumented children and young people in the UK.

What type of support do you provide?

The KIND programme has been a long-standing part of our pro bono work – with pro bono being a key limb of our responsible business strategy. There are an estimated 200,000+ undocumented children living in the UK who are British or entitled to British citizenship and looking to prove their right to live and gain legal status to remain in the UK. Through the KIND programme, we work with individual children and help them get their immigration status regulated.  These are children who are entitled to British citizenship or have leave to remain.

What inspired you to get involved in volunteering?

I find it very rewarding to be involved in this type of work, as the outcome has the potential to change lives, alleviate worry and stress for parents and enable the individual child to truly feel accepted as a valued citizen of the country in which they reside. The appreciation from the client of our involvement in this kind of work and in being able to utilise our services is really very genuine and heart-warming.

Where is our help making the biggest difference?

For individual clients who might otherwise struggle to access legal advice, services such as these are really important in helping them to gain support. The pro bono advice we’re able to provide can help to smooth and streamline the application process for individuals that would, or could, otherwise get very stressed and confused by what’s involved. In addition, we’re able to help them understand the relevant requirements for their application and the reasons for those requirements.

Is there one particular experience or highlight from your time working on pro bono that you can share?

A successful fee waiver application for a client where, in the early stages of the process, it seemed like it might prove difficult to even make the application due to a lack of supporting documents and evidence. However, through clear and consistent communications with the client on the information required – including, how to obtain it and from where – and detailed scrutiny of the various individual pieces of information to help complete the jigsaw, we were not only able to make the application but also achieve a successful outcome.

What are the key skills you feel you’ve gained most from your time as a pro bono volunteer?

For me, two key skill areas stand out:

Listening – in my experience, across all the cases I’ve worked on, while clients are approaching us for our legal assistance, they also sometimes just want/need us to listen to them and understand their circumstances and/or the issues they may be encountering more generally. So it’s important to remember that to us, and them, our support is about more than the law.

Coaching – not in the sense of the type of training or supervising we might undertake in our day-to-day roles, but rather encouraging clients to remain positive and showing them how and where to obtain the information required. This might entail advising on how to approach other individuals (including professionals) for the pieces of information they need.

What three words sum up your experience as a pro bono volunteer?

Fulfilling, appreciative (i.e. that I can help), and diverse.

What our charity partners say about us…

“Gowling WLG has been a highly valued KIND UK partner for more than four years. Their lawyers are a pleasure to work with and have helped many children around the UK, but especially in the West Midlands, gain British citizenship. We wouldn’t have been able to grow our programme so much without the support from Gowling WLG, so we look forward to working together for many more years to come.” Katie Fennell, National Coordinator, Kids in Need of Defense