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The project’s goal is to empower individuals in the pursuit of their rights.
Beata’s Project, Legal Self-Care, is a platform where individuals or groups can mutually teach and learn the law by meeting and sharing their know-how; participating in workshops on drafting official documents; creating handbooks in specific fields of activities; and developing social campaign strategies focused on bringing about changes in the law.
It is also a platform that allows individuals to find substantive, psychological, emotional, logistical, and strategic support. The project’s goal is to empower individuals in the pursuit of their rights. It is not an educational project. Instead, the goal of the project is to create a non-hierarchical network of mutual help.
Legal Self-Care brings together individuals seeking assistance and those who can provide assistance: legal professionals, activists, psychologists, community organizers, as well as non-governmental organizations, businesses, and informal groups.
Beata’s Ambitions
The idea behind the project stems from Beata’s years of experience participating in and creating grass-roots organizations. While each organization brings a terrific amount of good, they do not always successfully cooperate and leverage the pooled resources and know-how. Legal Self-Care intends to make use of the potential that those groups hold and enable people to meet and work together. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the critical nature of grass-roots actions and the cooperation among local communities.
Legal Self-Care brings together individuals seeking assistance and those who can provide assistance: legal professionals, activists, psychologists, community organizers, as well as non-governmental organizations, businesses, and informal groups.
The name Legal Self-Care relates to a host of ideas:
- First, it pertains to the idea of cooperatives and their role as a democratic form of organizations of various initiatives.
- Second, “self-help” in Polish is commonly understood as helping one another without expecting help from state institutions.
- Third, “self-care” is a legal term embedded in the Polish civil code meaning making oneself whole or asserting one’s rights, both through her own actions.
- Fourth, Legal Self-Care may bring about the memory of Farmers’ Self-care: cooperatives present in rural socialist Poland dealing in trading farmed goods, operating bakeries, butcher’s, bars, and social gatherings in Farmers’ Clubs. Most of those cooperatives survived the neo-liberal reforms of the 1990s and still operate.
- This project is also inspired by labor unions. Sadly, the number of unionized workers in Poland today is low, but legal Self-Care strives to continue the legacy of labor unions.
Updated December 2021.
