We encourage practitioners to adopt a community empowerment approach, and wish you every success in achieving documentation, legal reform, and empowerment for the communities and individuals you serve. 1.1 Who Should Use this Practitioner’s Guide? This guide is primarily for people designing and managing communitybased paralegal projects to help clients access documentary proof of citizenship and other forms of proof of legal identity, such as birth certificates. However, it will also be useful to those undertaking legal aid, litigation, and non-litigation advocacy work, as the issues that it seeks to address frequently lie at the intersection of laws and how they are applied in practice. This guide may be useful if your project can or will work on any of these issues: • Nationality rights • Birth registration • Other forms of civil registration (marriage, divorce, adoption, death certificates) • Access to documentation • Effective citizenship rights • Community legal empowerment • Non-discrimination • Minority issues • Child protection • Migration • Immigration detention • Refugee and asylum issues • People trafficking • Internal displacement • Housing, land, and property rights • Access to basic services (education, health, etc.) IN DEP TH THE IMPACT OF PARALEGALS Paralegals use knowledge of the law and skills like mediation, organizing, community education, and advocacy to seek concrete solutions to instances of injustice. They might be NGO staff, volunteers, community members, lawyers’ assistants, social workers, or law students, to cite a few examples. In some countries, paralegals can be officially accredited. Community paralegals act as a bridge between the law and everyday situations. Community paralegals focus on empowerment. Their aim is to solve problems with clients while also empowering them to solve problems on their own in the future. For more information on the role of paralegals, see 7. Building the Right Team: Human Resources. • Rule of law and governance This guide provides advice and support for paralegal work on documentation of citizenship and other forms of proof of legal identity. It contains decision-making direction to help project teams and individuals think through key strategic, programmatic, and operational choices and approaches. It provides information related to starting, implementing, and sustaining a project to address the needs of vulnerable populations, as well as to bring about change on a systemic level through communitydriven advocacy and strategic litigation. It provides comprehensive information that can be adapted to a variety of situations. A C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D P R A C T I T I O N E R ’ S G U I D E : D O C U M E N T I N G C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D OT H E R F O R M S O F L E G A L I D E N T I T Y | 11