Volunteers with CASA of Kosciusko County benefit the children they advocate for just by seeing them, caring for them, spending time with them and listening to what they have to say.
With CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) seeing an increasing number of children, more volunteers are needed.
An open house for anyone interested in becoming a CASA is scheduled for 4 to 6 p.m May 13 at Warsaw Community Church.
Erin Rowland Jones, CASA executive director, said CASA of Kosciusko County is currently serving 108 abused and neglected children. There are a few more that are from family law-type of cases, she said. There are 56 CASA volunteers, with 48 of them currently having active cases.
“We have a lot right now that are taking a little bit of a break, which we completely understand. But we have seen at least 37 new kids in the last 60-plus days come into our program. So, ideally, I would love to have a volunteer core of 75 volunteers, or even more. That would allow some breaks in between cases. That would allow us to do some other high-conflict, safety issue family law cases. Right now, we really can’t serve those. Our focus is the child abuse and neglect cases,” she said.
With all the new cases coming in, Rowland Jones said CASA is in desperate need of more volunteers.
Janelle Meyer, CASA program manager, has been with the office for 11 years. She does all the recruiting and training of new volunteers.
“It’s been several years since we’ve been able to open up our services to the judges to do the family law cases,” she said.
CHINS (Children In Need of Services) are the children involved with the Department of Child Services and they have all been abused or neglected and brought into the court system, Meyer said in explaining the different types of cases.
“But there’s also cases where the judge is working with people who are fighting over custody or maybe they’re fighting about visitation and what’s appropriate and safe for the child. The judges on those cases say, ‘I’m hearing one story from this side and a story from that side and both of you sound terrible.’ So that would be an opportunity for the judge to say, ‘Can we put a CASA on this?’ to go out and establish what is factual and what is in that child’s best interest without somebody painting their side of the story. Just the child’s perspective,” Meyer said.
“So we would love to get on some more of those, but it has been at least five years since we’ve had the ability to just say, ‘Judge, put us on whatever you need us on.’ He or she can only put us on the really, really difficult ones because we just don’t have volunteers available,” she continued.
There is a state statute that says there has to be a CASA or guardian ad litem in every CHINS case, Rowland Jones said. In Kosciusko County, guardian ad litems (GALs) are attorneys, but there aren’t enough attorneys to do that, so the county uses the CASA program. “So that’s why we’re appointed to every single one of these children that have been abused and neglected,” she said.
If anyone is interested in volunteering with CASA, or learning more, Meyer invited them to come out to the open house and talk with them.
“It’s going to be an opportunity to answer any of the questions that you may still have. We know that there’s a lot of people who have thought about it, but don’t know if they’re ready yet and we would love to talk to them more and answer any of those last questions that they have,” she said.
Rowland Jones said there will be CASA volunteers at the open house, as well as additional staff.
“Sometimes it’s nice to talk to somebody that is a current volunteer, so we’ll have different people they can talk to, answer questions, even help you fill out an application if you want to be involved in the next training,” she said.
Meyer said the basic requirements are that a person needs to be at least 21 years old, be able to pass a background check and complete the initial training.
The training goes through the basics of what a volunteer needs to know. It takes about five weeks, generally in the evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If there’s enough interest in day training, Meyer said they could do that, too.
Rowland Jones said they would really like to do a class in June, if possible and if there are enough people who want to get involved. Trainings usually take place in spring and fall, “but we have such a need that we would like to get a class together this summer,” she said.
“When I was looking back through the number of volunteers we’ve added, in the last 10 years, we used to have trainings of 10 people at a minimum. And, after Covid hit, the number has continued to stay about five or six,” Meyer said. “So, we understand when we look at 2014, we added 23 new volunteers in that year. If we look at 2023, we only added four volunteers. That’s a huge difference and is causing us to not be able to keep up with the amount of cases.”
There are ebbs and flows to the number of cases CASA has and they were in a slower period of not getting a lot of new cases, she said. This year alone, however, they have over 40 new children.
“On average, we normally would get one or two cases, so three to five kids in a month. Some months we would get no kids, but this last period has been (high) and we’re not seeing it slow down at this point, so we are running out of available volunteers,” Meyer explained. “It’s why we are begging the community to help us meet the need, because these children need to be advocated for and there have been some tough cases.”
Rowland Jones said they are hoping to find people who are willing to commit to 18-plus months to CASA because that tends to be the average length of a case.
“It’s really important to us that these children, that have already gone through so much change, and may have a number of different providers. They may have case managers that come and go. It’s important to us that they have the same CASA for the duration because they’re already going through a lot of trauma ... we want to be a consistent, caring person for them,” she said.
Meyer said CASA is “best-interest advocates, which means we are there to represent what’s best for the child. That means, not necessarily what they want all the time, but what we think is best.”
About 50% of CASA’s volunteers work in some capacity, whether that’s a full- or part-time job, Rowland Jones said. If there’s a day meeting that a volunteer can attend, CASA staff will attend it on their behalf.
“The support they get from the office, and I’ve heard it from a lot of our CASAs, is world class. And I don’t call it supervision, it’s supporting. We are walking alongside them, every step of the way. We’re making sure they understand what’s going to be happening in court, helping them write reports to the court. They do write reports to the court with their recommendations of what’s best for the child, about every four to six months. And we help them with those as much as we can,” she said.
Volunteers are asked to be prepared to be available anywhere from five to 10 hours per month. Meyer said 10 would be a really heavy month and not common, but they want the volunteers to be ready for that just in case. She said it’s usually two to five hours a month. Except for things like court and meetings, CASA usually works with volunteers’ schedules as much as possible.
For more information, visit casachildren.com; call 574-372-2401; or email Meyer at [email protected]