McGill University Faculty of Law graduate, Shona Moreau, is working at the intersection of human rights and legal justice in Johannesburg, South Africa. Growing up in the area and working with clients from asylum seeking or refugee backgrounds with the Lawyers for Human Rights Legal Clinic, Shona recognized the barriers that the community faced in accessing legal services.  

“Traditional legal clinics, while vital, do expect clients to come to them,” Shona notes. “Every trip across Johannesburg represents lost wages or childcare challenges. This Fellowship offered the opportunity to build a new approach from the ground up with the community, meeting people where they are and understanding their daily realities.” 

Accessibility and the physical location of the clinic became a recurrent theme communicated to Shona with various clients. In thinking about possible solutions, she became curious about the possibilities of a mobile clinic model and brought the issue to her team.  

Driven to see this idea come to life, Shona’s Pathy Fellowship initiative, Law for All: Empowering Refugees Through Legal Aid Access, seeks to equip community members with knowledge and skills to navigate the legal system within the security of their communities. 

“There’s a lot of fear and there’s a lot of vulnerability,” Shona explains. “It’s complicated and scary. A lot of people feel that when they go in to declare themselves and seek legal support, the government is going to come after them. When we’ve been talking with our clients and reimagining with our community, the idea that keeps coming back is that justice shouldn’t require a passport. Refugees have a right to justice even though the situations are more complex and complicated to navigate.” 

Through the Pathy Fellowship, Shona will pilot the model of a Mobile Legal Clinic to make legal support more convenient, accessible, and community-based. 

Directed by the input of clients, and with the support of Lawyers for Human rights and other network collaborators, Shona is hopeful that this service will be of benefit to the community, and shift the norms of legal access. 

The Pathy Foundation Fellowship supports graduating students to lead a self-directed initiative in a community that they have a meaningful connection with. Over the course of one year, Fellows bring their passion projects to life, while benefiting from a rich support network, generous funding, state-of-the-art training, and a committed cohort of likeminded leaders.  

“I feel like I’ve been so much more purposeful,” Shona says. “The idea of being slower paced was something I discovered in the Fellowship and made me kind of reimagine leadership and community work and projects in a way I hadn’t really given myself time to reflect and practice.” 

Shona describes her passion for law and making legal services more accessible to the community as, “all consuming, but in a good way.”   

“When I came out of Law School, I wasn’t exactly sure if law was for me,” Shona explains. “Then I come here and everything I’m doing, I’m like, ‘yeah, this is exactly the way I always wanted to practice law.’”  

While Shona works to offer legal services physically to refugee communities through the Mobile Legal Clinic, her initiative also aims to meet people where they are with legal information. The team is currently working on a handbook to support community members navigate preliminary legal issues.  

“I was talking with a client, and she joked, ‘this is all still complicated, but at least I know what I’m signing,’” Shona shares. “When people can navigate the legal system independently, they regain a sense of control over their lives.”

Shona hopes to host an event in the coming months where the team will walk through legal supports and share the handbook with the community. “This initiative isn’t just about legal aid. At the end of the day, it’s about dignity,” Shona explains.  

Looking to the future, Shona is bringing Law students into the initiative to support its continued efforts while also training others on how to use and understand the Handbook.  

Beyond the Fellowship, Shona’s vision of success is asylum seeker and refugee communities that “no longer sees the legal system as a barrier but really sees it as a tool for their own empowerment.”  

To learn more about Shona’s Pathy Fellowship initiative, or the Pathy Foundation Fellowship, please visit www.PathyFellowship.com.