Nearly 50 years ago, a Seattle juvenile court judge came up with the idea of using trained volunteers to appear in court to speak on behalf of abused and neglected children as a way to get more information about their individual cases.
Today, nearly a thousand local Court Appointed Special Advocate programs exist in 49 states, including Oregon. CASA volunteers provide the court with regular updates about a child’s particular case and make recommendations about their placement, informed through monthly visits with the child and discussions with their teachers, counselors and others involved in their welfare.
But meeting the growing need for CASAs in Oregon and the rest of the nation is getting tougher. In April, the national CASA organization announced the termination of federal grants totaling millions of dollars which would have been disbursed to state and local CASA programs. That’s in addition to the loss of a $1.7 million federal community project grant earmarked for Oregon’s 19 local CASA programs.
Joining us to share their experiences are Amy Muñoz, who has been serving Jackson County as a CASA volunteer for seven years, and Rachel Robb, who was sworn in as a CASA volunteer serving Malheur County in January.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to the Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA program. It uses trained volunteers who appear in court to speak on behalf of abused or neglected children. In April, we talked to two CASA managers about the loss of federal funding. Today, I’m joined by two CASA volunteers. Amy Muñoz has been doing this work in Jackson County for seven years now. Rachel Robb was sworn in as a CASA volunteer in Malheur County in January. Welcome to you both.
Amy Muñoz: Thank you.
Rachel Robb: Thank you.
Miller: Amy, can you remind us the basics here, what a court-appointed special advocate does?
Muñoz: So when a child is in the foster care system and is made a ward of the court, each biological parent, if applicable, is assigned an attorney, and those attorneys will do whatever the mother or father wants. The child is appointed an attorney as well, who will do whatever the child wants. And a CASA is there to advocate specifically for the child. They are a legal party to the case. We will get the same type of discovery that the attorneys get, medical information, we can interview teachers, relatives, anybody pertinent to the case.
Then a CASA will give a report to the court giving our opinion on what we think is best for the child, which may or may not align with what DHS wants, may or may not align with what the families want, or the child wants. But it’s based on all of the information that we collect and then forming that opinion and giving the report to the court for consideration.
Miller: This is a key point here and one thing that I think has always been a little bit surprising. As you noted, the child has an attorney – it could be a 6-month-old, it could be an 8-year-old. But the idea behind CASA is that there are times when what a 5-year-old says they want and what their attorney is going to argue for, you as a CASA may determine that’s actually not in the child’s best interest, even if that’s what they want their lawyer to ask for.
Muñoz: Exactly, yeah. And whether it’s a little kid or a teenager sometimes, especially with the younger ones, most kids inherently love their parents no matter what. And even if they’ve been a victim of abuse or neglect, a lot of times their instinct is to want to be with their parents. If that’s possible, if there’s a safe way to do that, then we want to see that happen. Sometimes, unfortunately, that’s not the case. Sometimes there’s a parent who, for whatever reason, just may not be capable.
For example, there was a case I had with a medically fragile child, and the parent had kind of diminished mental capacity. As much as he wanted to have that child, it just wasn’t a safe environment for her. He was unhoused and she just needed advanced medical care. A CASA will try to do what’s best for the kiddo. A lot of times that is in alignment with what the child wants, but not every time.
Miller: Rachel, as I noted, you’ve been doing this officially since January, so for about seven months. Why did you decide to become a CASA volunteer?
Robb: I was at the point in my career where I was looking to do some volunteer work. I am a community mental health counselor and turned into a school counselor, so I’ve always worked with children. I’ve always wanted to help children in any way I can. And through that experience, that’s when I first met CASA workers, they would come and talk to me about some of the clients that I was seeing that were in the foster care system. As I was deciding on some volunteer work, CASA came to my mind.
And then to be honest with you, there’s a billboard, only one in my little town, and it was a CASA billboard that kept saying “come join us, we need advocates.” That kind of triggered me to apply and now here we are.
Miller: It was a sign that you should do it.
Robb: [Laughs] The literal sign, yeah.
Miller: So you were sworn in in January. What was that ceremony like?
Robb: It was actually really quite special. I was the only advocate that was sworn in in January. It included me, the CASA supervisors and the judge. And it was really quite special in what the judge says when you’re being sworn in and just how CASA volunteers really do help the process. They actually are really important to the process. And hearing the judge say that and speak highly of CASA volunteers made me know that, wow, I’m really doing something in volunteer work that really might be changing a child’s life.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the level of need for this work that you see in Malheur County right now?
Robb: Yes. I cannot remember our exact numbers, but I will say that Malheur County is the largest county in Oregon. It’s not the most populated, but it is the largest, most rural county. And we definitely have more foster children in the system than we have advocates. It is getting, I think, a less far ratio. However, there is still quite a large need for CASA volunteers in this area.
Miller: Without giving identifying information, could you give us a sense for cases that you’re currently managing?
Robb: As the other CASA volunteers spoke about, there’s a variety of ways you can end up in the foster care system. Some common ways around here are abuse, physical abuse or sexual abuse, or neglect. I will say in certain circumstances you will get a family, but the family might have different parents involved. So you might have a family of four children, where there’s three that have the same mom and dad and maybe one has a different father, so the dynamics do kind of switch there. And then reunification or whatever the advocacy looks like might look different. Then it also kind of depends on, if there is physical abuse, it might not have happened to all of the children, so that level of safety might look different for each child.
Miller: Amy, what’s your case load like right now?
Muñoz: Right now, I have two cases. One is a baby girl under the age of 1, and the other is a little girl who’s 2 1/2. Cases usually run around a year, sometimes they go longer. So both of these kiddos I’ve had for … well, the baby since she was born and the other one for about just over a year. Both instances that I have right now were babies who were born drug addicted. One of them had an initial case in a different county and then was with parents. Unfortunately, her mother passed away, the father got caught up in something else.
So in both of my cases, parents were ordered for addiction services, mental health services. Both of the kids are placed with their parents. They each spent a little bit of time in foster care but are now with the parents. That’s done when the court determines that it’s safe, either the parents have completed or in the midst of doing the remedial things that they’ve been ordered to do, or there’s a safety person in the home that can be there to monitor and make sure that the children are safe.
So both families that I’m working with right now, the single dad as well as the parents of the baby, are doing great. They’ve done addiction recovery, they’ve done parenting classes. They get additional skill training like financial education, budgeting, job referrals, how to complete a resume, how to do a job interview. They’re learning things that they didn’t know before, which ironically makes them better parents than if they hadn’t been in the system. And so both of the ones that I have right now are doing really well and their cases are both probably going to close within the next few months. They’re both on track to end with really good outcomes.
Miller: Why did you want to do this work?
Muñoz: A lot of the people go into it if they’ve had personal experiences in the system in one way or another. I was really fortunate to have a stable family background. But I do have quite a few family and friends with various mental health struggles, either currently or when they were younger. And I’ve seen what it was like to have to manage that. I also think it’s a big root cause of a lot of the problems that lead to child abuse and neglect. Kids are especially vulnerable, and they need adults who can advocate for them. So I just wanted to be able to provide that type of support for families and increase the odds for better outcomes.
Miller: Did you have preconceptions about the child welfare system before you started doing this work that have been challenged or changed?
Muñoz: I think most people think that kids in the DHS system are automatically in foster care. I didn’t realize that a lot of them are still placed in the home. I didn’t know what a CASA was, I had just heard about it and learned about it, so I didn’t know that existed.
I believe that if people want to change and they are motivated within themselves, that they can. So I was really pleased to see that there are a lot of support systems available. I’m in Jackson County, so I don’t know if it’s exactly the same in more rural counties, but here we have a lot of resources available to help people. Those that want the help, there are other services available to them. Because when it’s safe and appropriate, the goal is reunification. When it’s not, then we turn to adoption or guardianship, other types of placements. But there is a lot of support for parents whose kids are in the system where those parents want to be able to do better, learn the things they need to do, be sober, safe and all of those things.
So yeah, it was pleasantly surprising to me that the goal is to get those kids with their parents.
Miller: What do you think it takes to be a good CASA?
Muñoz: Definitely good communication skills and open mindedness. Your own background or how you parented your children may not be the same way other people do it, but that’s not really what we’re here for. Good writing skills, because we are reporting to the court and the judge is reading that, so we have to be able to write well, explain what’s going on in a case and give a history in a very specific format. Having a level of compassion for the situation.
It isn’t always a happy ending. Even when there’s a happy ending, there can be people who are sad. If you have a case where there’s multiple people who want this kiddo in their home, whether it’s family or foster family, they’re ultimately going to land in one place. So understanding that even in the case of reunification, if you have a foster family that was really hoping to adopt this kid, it may be very sad for them. Even though it’s a win for the child, there’s just a lot of different facets to it. So you have to be able to have that compassion and empathy for all of the parties involved.
Miller: Rachel, how do you deal with the emotional toll of all of this?
Robb: Like what Amy was saying, it’s really helpful to be in a good place yourself mentally, having good coping skills, being able to set good boundaries with people and with your role as a volunteer, not letting that seep into other areas of your life. So compartmentalizing is also a good skill to have. But this is kind of also part of my career, right? Definitely advocating for kids can be very difficult and hard because it doesn’t always end how you might want it to or in the best way possible, that we think would be the best way. So you have to be able to know how to cope with that and deal with that, and how are you going to not let that discourage you but continue to find that drive to continue to advocate for other children.
Miller: Amy, I mentioned that we had two CASA directors on back in April to talk about the loss of federal funding. Have you seen the impacts of federal cuts in your own work as a CASA volunteer?
Muñoz: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it’s more to come, unfortunately. There’s been so many budget cuts to a variety of social services, both here in Oregon and just federally – huge, huge budget cuts. All of these organizations, including CASA, are gonna have to rely even more on volunteers to fill the gaps across the board.
Oregon in particular already has a shortage of social workers and family court attorneys, so with reducing funds for CASA, who’s watching out for these kids? We see in our program, typically, the kids and families that have these extreme needs. And honestly, instead of cutting services, we really should be funding more programs to prevent ongoing cycles of abuse and trauma. It’s going to be, unfortunately, I think even worse down the road as we’re seeing more and more budget cuts.
Miller: Amy and Rachel, thanks very much.
Muñoz: Thanks for having us.
Robb: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Miller: Amy Muñoz has been a Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA, in Jackson County for seven years. Rachel Robb has been doing this work in Malheur County since January.
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