We provide legal assistance to some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country to the value of as much as £1 million a year, on a budget of less than £35,000.

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There are lots of different ways that you can support us. We’re a charity and we couldn’t continue our work without your help.

Over the past 25 years the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) has established a cross-disciplinary network of professional members who each year provide a significant amount of pro bono advice and assistance to socially and economically disadvantaged communities across the UK who contact ELF seeking environmental justice. We empower local people to address all manner of adverse environmental issues and challenges. We help them to protect wildlife habitats and public green spaces. We improve the levels of public participation in environmental decision-making.

ELF sees itself as a network of environmentally interested people and communities who all contribute to ELF’s mission of increasing access to environmental justice for all. Through ELF’s network of pro-bono law university clinics, environmental law academics and professional adviser network of scientists and environmental lawyers and barristers, we bring together a rich diversity of environmental support to the communities that approach us for assistance.

With an ever growing public and professional membership including those communities that we are able to support through the provision of free legal environmental and planning advice and guidance, we recognise that it is through the environmental networks that ELF builds, that we can increasingly support each other.

If you are an environmental law or science professional or a local environmental community group, please join ELF and become part of this community of interested people.

ELF University Network

An overview

Since the 2008 collapse of widespread grant funding for charities, including ours, ELF has adapted radically to enable us to do more good work, with much less cash.

Today, instead of a team of managers and student interns based in central London offices, initial calls are fielded by a service kindly provided by Irwin Mitchell. Simpler and essentially academic cases, are handled by a network of ELF university-based law clinics. This leaves our in-house A&R lawyer free to focus on direct advice and liaising between client communities and our network of pro bono specialist environmental lawyers.

These changes have proved beneficial for our member lawyers, for the supervised student lawyers who love working on real ELF cases and especially for the communities we serve. They have also reduced our costs to the point at which, whilst we cannot yet survive on membership fees and donations alone, we could survive, run the charity better and grow towards full sustainability, on fees & donations plus £30,000 per year.

Find out more

Universities we are working with: