A NOTE ON THE PREPARATION OF THIS GUIDE THIS GUIDE WAS DEVELOPED IN RESPONSE TO THE GROWING RECOGNITION of the opportunity for community-based justice actors to assist individuals and communities suffering from a lack of documentation of citizenship or other forms of proof of legal identity. This guide is the result of a series of consultations, discussions on addressing statelessness, and lack of legal identity documentation. In 2012, the Open Society Justice Initiative and Namati launched a collaborative project bringing a community-based paralegal approach to the issue of denial of access to proof of legal identity documentation in Kenya, Nepal, and Bangladesh. At the same time, other organizations initiated similar projects in Western Europe, Malaysia, Chile, Lebanon, and elsewhere. In October 2015, the Open Society Justice Initiative and the Civil Registration Centre for Development (CRC4D) convened a consultative workshop on legal identity in New York. The next month UNHCR, Namati, and the Open Society Justice Initiative organized an International Paralegal Practitioner Roundtable of groups employing a community-based paralegal approach to address statelessness, legal identity documentation, and citizenship. Members of the assembled organizations agreed on the need for this guide. In mid-2017, UNHCR, the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Namati circulated a questionnaire to 47 organizations around the world that have run or supported community-based programs to address statelessness, access to documentation, or equal exercise of citizenship rights. The questions related to establishing, maintaining, and expanding community-based projects for birth and nationality documentation, and asked practitioners to share case studies, tools, and guidance. Thirty-two responses were received; some respondents provided input via Skype. The responses informed this guide. Twenty-five individuals with experience with paralegal documentation projects gathered in London in August 2017 for a two-day workshop to evaluate the structure and content of a consultative draft of the guide. Feedback was invited from practitioners from all parts of the world and a variety of contexts. An oversight team from the Norwegian Refugee Council (Norway/Global), PUSKAPA (Indonesia), and New York University (United States) provided written comments on the conceptual framework and initial draft. The final text was produced by Namati and the Open Society Justice Initiative in cooperation with UNHCR. The Practitioners Directory at the end lists organizations and individuals who contributed case studies, responded to the questionnaire, and/or attended the London workshop. USING THIS GUIDE This guide emphasizes several themes that are especially important to creating and operating a community-based program that seeks to provide documentation of citizenship and identity. These important themes appear frequently throughout the book. The following icons are used to indicate where the themes appear: 4 | DISCRIMINATION EMPOWERMENT SUSTAINABILITY DATA RELATED RESOURCES (EXTERNAL) RELATED SECTIONS (WITHIN) 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