CASA

The stepped-up oversight has resulted in staff furloughs at the 39-year-old National CASA/GAL Association for Children.

When she turned 21 last year, seven years after entering foster care in New York City, Jeanette Rivera suddenly found herself fending for herself — and her three young children.  “They didn’t wait to make sure that I was ready to be on my own, they didn’t make sure I had food, that my bills were paid or that I even understood how to pay my portion of my rent,” Rivera said.

Sixteen months after the heart-breaking death of its long-time executive director, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute has hired its next permanent leader, who inherits the challenge of steadying an organization amidst a pandemic.

My name is Lauren Werner and I am a senior at a California state university. My educational aspirations consist of acquiring a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a concentration in global culture, and a double minor in political science and French.

We think all the time about the major traumas that impact the  youth in our care — their removal from families, the abuse and neglect they may have experienced, and the uncertainty and cyclical upheavals that too often dominate their lives.

On Dec. 3, a 28-year-old black mother lost her parental rights to her four children – ages 1 to 9 – in a Minnesota courtroom, just outside the Twin Cities. Instead of opening presents with their mother, the children spent Christmas with a white family two hours away.

Yordi, 20, is wan after a harrowing escape from horrors in his home country, Honduras. It is mid-July. He sits in a corporate ICE detention facility in rural Folkston, Georgia, staring into a computer screen that connects him to his 29-year-old brother Suamhirs Piraino-Guzman, thousands of miles away in Seattle.

Former Juvenile Court Judge Len Edwards, a favorite on the child welfare conference circuit, is upset about a column I wrote here on March 8. The column discussed an article in the City University of New York Law Review that calls that most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), “an exercise of white supremacy.”

Idaho, 1902: An “officer” of the Episcopal Diocese of Idaho writes about how fortunate Native American children are when they are taken from their homes and forced into white-run orphanages.  “What a contrast” those wonderful orphanages are, she writes, to the children’s own homes: The smoking fire in the centre of the tepee, and on it the pot of soup stirred by the not over-clean squaw … and then to think of the neat, comfortable home at the mission, with the uplifting of its daily prayer … Washington State, 2016: A Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), a volunteer named by a juvenile court to investigate a black family, explains why the court should sever the bond between a black father and his children forever: Formerly homeless, the father had bought an RV for the family to live in.