Dispatch from the road: Montréal site visit and Ottawa interviews

I began this week in Montréal, QC, with a two-day visit to Éducaloi. Québec’s only sole-purpose PLEI organization, Éducaloi serves a province of over 7.5 million people—82% Francophone—and where the official language is French. Éducaloi is also the youngest provincial sole-purpose PLEI organization in Canada (founded in 1999–2000). At the core of the organization’s programming is its gigantic website, which provides constantly-updated plain-language legal information on a broad range of topics. Beyond the website, Éducaloi works on a number of special projects, including plain language publications. youth camps and schools programming, and an interesting project to replicate the parliamentary committee process as a way for school-aged students to democratically modify their schools’ student codes. Éducaloi is also notable for its special attention to branding and image, and for the success it has had in attracting media attention.

For the second half of the week, I was in Ottawa, ON. With the exception of a new, law school-based project called the Ontario Public Legal Education Initiative and a lone Ottawa-based staff member of the Ontario Justice Education Network (OJEN), there is no sole-purpose PLEI presence here. Most of my time, thus, has been spent talking with those involved in PLEI funding and policy work in the federal government and with those involved in Canadian PLEI who have ended up in Ottawa for one reason or another.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Visualizing the PLEI provider context in the US and Canada
• Government communications vs. PLEI: Part 2
• Reforming PLEI practice