The CASA Comment : WA Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Blog : Official Blog of Washington State CASA: Child Welfare, Foster Care Commentary

After a long and intensive search, Barbara James has been named Executive Director of Washington State CASA!  

Most recently, Barbara led an award-winning twenty two year old academic organization, Read 2 Me™ through two mergers. Before moving to the Pacific Northwest four years ago, Barbara spent much of her early career, holding positions of increasing responsibility at Orangewood Children’s Foundation in Southern California where she made her first acquaintance with the work of CASA, and was a founding board member of 44 Women for Children.  

With over twenty years of diversified experience with public and private entities both in the corporate and non-profit sectors, her expertise includes building comprehensive fund development departments, overseeing individual, major and deferred charitable gifts, capital campaigns, annual giving programs, special event planning, grant writing, volunteer coordination and marketing and public relations activities.

She looks forward to bringing her breadth of experience, along with her passion to serve the dependent children of Washington to WaCASA, as she strengthens the agency from a position of downturn to a period of growth and increased programming for the CASA volunteers.  Because without a CASA volunteer, children are more likely to fall through the cracks of the child welfare system, leading to longer lengths of stay in foster care, and a heightened risk of abuse and neglect. 

A resident of Gig Harbor, in her “off” time, Barbara is likely to be found along side her husband, Allan, on the baseball field or selling Girl Scout cookies with their two daughters, Charlotte and Lilly Ann. 

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In honor of April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month, Washington State CASA is proud to announce our 7th annual Light of Hope fund raising event! It is an opportunity for community members to join together to support the vision of CASA: to ensure that every abused, neglected or abandoned child has a safe, supportive and permanent home.

This year's Light of Hope will be held as a breakfast on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at the Harbor Club Seattle in downtown Seattle. The program will run from 7:30am-8:30am.

The program will feature esteemed keynote speaker, Attorney General Rob McKenna.

Registration is required and complimentary; there will be a request of financial support at the event. This is an opportunity for supporters to make a positive, lifelong difference for abused and neglected children.

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When legislators convene once a year in Olympia for legislative session, they're faced with decisions regarding both the state budget and potential legislation. Because there are so many agencies vying for state dollars, it's up to each organization to sell its mission to the people making and passing the budget.

WaCASA's main vein of contact with the legislature is our Legislative Partner program. Legislative partners are people who are connected to CASA in some way, whether they're volunteers, staff members, donors, students, or otherwise. Throughout the year, legislative partners have semi-guided* informal pre-session meetings with their districts' legislators, talking about the CASA program and what it's like to be a CASA volunteer.

*Throughout the year, WaCASA sends reminder emails to the legislative partners asking them to meet with their legislators for coffee or caramels. In the email, we provide a list of potential talking points and tips for talking to legislators. The point of these meetings is to form personal relationships between legislators and CASA volunteers in the off-session (when legislators aren't as busy), and to show lawmakers why CASA is such an imperative service to our community.

Once a year during session, WaCASA hosts Advocacy Day - a day when legislative partners from across the state meet in Olympia to formally meet with legislators or legislative aids, and talk about CASA. We meet in the morning as a group, where WaCASA's lobbyist gives pointers for talking to legislators, WaCASA staff explains what key points to discuss in the meetings, and legislative partners can meet up with other folks from their districts and go to the meetings together. Advocacy Day is where the pre/post-session meetings are so important, because not only are legislators more likely to make time to talk to their constituents when they have a preexisting relationship, but they also already know about CASA, and so are more likely to remember and consider us when they're later discussing laws and budgets.

Anyone can be a legislative partner; it's an empowering experience to know that you are firsthand helping to shape your government's path. There are no requirements for becoming a legislative partner, except a desire to help foster children at the policy level.

For more information on becoming a legislative partner, contact Aleksa Lazarewicz at alazarewicz@wacasa.org or 206.667.9716.

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CASA volunteers achieve results for kids

Judges rely on community volunteers who bring an independent voice into the courtroom. Research indicates that children with a CASA are more likely to:

• have fewer and more appropriate placements
• spend less time in the social service system and are less likely to reenter
• have an increased amount of time spent on their cases
• be placed in safe, permanent homes more quickly

CASA builds cost-effective partnerships

Since state law and the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) both require that all abused and neglected children have someone to represent their best interests in court, a CASA volunteer is appointed when available. When a CASA is not available, the court must appoint a paid guardian ad litem or no representation at all.

Last year, CASA volunteers:

• donated approximately 350,000 hours of service to children
• averaged 15-20 hours every month to each child they advocated for
• represented a community value of over $17 million

Despite record numbers of children being served, more than 6,000 children went without a CASA volunteer last year*.

*Due to a lack of program staff to recruit, train, and adequately support enough volunteers, local CASA programs cannot currently serve every child that enters the system.

In 2008, more than 2,400 CASA volunteers advocated for the best interests of 7,355 abused and neglected children in Washington.

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In Washington, there are 35 local CASA programs*; each program is responsible for recruiting and training volunteers, assigning those volunteers to cases, and then providing the volunteers with all the support they need to be effective child advocates.

*32 of the 35 local CASA programs are broken up by county borders. The other three programs are Tribal CASA programs that work exclusively with children in their own tribes.

Washington State CASA (WaCASA) is the supporting association of all 35 CASA programs, providing them with assistance in four main areas: 

• Volunteer recruitment
• Volunteer training
• Technical assistance
• Partnership building

As an organization, WaCASA does not oversee local CASA programs; rather, WaCASA provides a support network to help the CASA programs effectively and efficiently serve as many abused and neglected children as possible.

In addition to supporting local CASA programs, WaCASA plays a role in child welfare policy creation by working directly with the legislature, and by actively participating in multiple statewide think-tanks and work groups whose intents are solely to improve the quality of life for children in the dependency system.

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A Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) is a volunteer who is appointed by a judge to advocate for an abused or neglected child in dependency court*.

*Dependency court (sometimes called 'the dependency system' or 'the system'): Dependency court is part of the superior court, and it hears cases about children who have been abused and neglected. In cases where the abuse or neglect is severe enough, the children will be taken out of their parents' homes and placed into foster care.

The CASA volunteer investigates the child's world by talking to the child, as well as to her teachers, parents, relatives, caregivers... anyone who has an impact on the child's life, and then makes recommendations to the court as to what is in the child's best interests. Those recommendations can range from whether the child should return to his parents or stay in foster care, to suggesting counseling services, special education classes, or substance abuse help for the child. The CASA volunteer's only objective is to recommend a course of action that will keep the child safe, and will address the child's unique, unmet needs.

While a child is in foster care, they face a constant rotation of judges, social workers, foster parents, and attorneys, all of whom are often only temporarily involved in the child's life, and for whom that child's case is one out of many. The CASA volunteer, however, commits himself to stay with the case for the duration (very rarely does it happen that the CASA volunteer will change mid-case), and it's a best practice that one CASA volunteer shouldn't take more than three cases at any given time. This means that each child is the CASA volunteer's priority. 

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