Court Appointed Special Advocates of Denton County is looking to bolster its volunteer advocate numbers and shared about the organization to encourage Ranch Cities residents to look into the organization.
CASA is an organization which provides a steady volunteer to children from abusive or neglectful situations while their cases are in court.
“When they advocate for those kids, they advocate for their educational needs, their emotional needs, their physical needs and their medical wellbeing while they’re in foster care,” Volunteer Manager Beth Potter said. “They’ll visit with the child, get to know them, see what their needs are and be that constant.”
She explained that often, a CASA advocate is the only constant in a child’s life while they’re going through the court process.
“There are a lot of changes in the child welfare system,” Potter said. “There could be a change in their placement, a change in the department as far as their caseworker, so our advocates tend to be that person who remains constant throughout the case. Our advocates do a lot of researching, finding out what’s going on with the child, and then they bring that before the court with any concerns they might have.”
Volunteers start with an information session of which CASA holds three per month, two in person and one virtual.
“Then what we do next is have an interview,” Potter said. “They’ll send in an application, and we’ll make sure it's a good match between us and them, and then there is an extensive 30-hour advocacy training they’ll do. It covers all the topics that would have to do with what's going on in the child welfare system, trauma the kids might be going through, substance abuse, [etc.], so they get a basic training with that.”
In addition to the training, each volunteer has access to the full-time staff who provide more seasoned support as they work on the case.
“Our office has a group of supervisors, paid staff that supervise those advocates and help them navigate the court system and help them to answer any questions and navigate community resources,” Potter said. “Our advocates are the boots on the ground and our supervisors help them navigate that court case.”
Potter explained that, unlike with CPS agents, each volunteer will only have one case at a time, allowing them to devote their time, an average of 12-15 hours a month, directly to one case, which can be a single child or a sibling group.
“If there are a large number of children in a family, many times we’ll have two advocates working together on that,” Potter said. “We do husband and wife, daughter-parent or friends. Usually those are on cases that have more than one child.”
Potter said personal qualifications are as simple as knowing how to gather information and the willingness and knowledge to advocate as one would for themselves or for their own children.
“The main thing is they have a passion for it because anything they do while they’re an advocate can make a difference in the life of a child while they’re in this process,” Potter said. “It is also very helpful for someone to know how to use a computer. All of our information is gathered on a database and that’s not something we can teach someone, so you need to be computer literate because everything is done on the computer.”
To get started, prospective advocates can check out casadenton.org/volunteer/ volunteer-info-session.
