Black Workers Forum, Bertha Foundation. All rights reserved.
Public interest law plays a crucial role in South Africa’s constitutional democracy. It has been instrumental in ensuring that the state is held to account for the way in which it delivers on its constitutionally enshrined mandate. However, one thing that the public interest law sector has not done is to champion the transformation of the legal services sector itself. For a while, no-one has been holding the sector to account.
In August 2016 a group of young black professionals working for various public interest organisations, decided to do the unthinkable and take their concerns about the barriers faced by black workers in the sector to those leading and funding the sector. The Public Interest Law Gathering Young Professionals, later known as the Black Workers Forum (“the BWF”), demanded transformation in the sector. They did this through submitting a list of ten demands to the management of the sector and approaching donors at the Public Interest Law Gathering (PILG) held at the University of Witwatersrand with the same demands.
