Cuyahoga County is in need of volunteer court advocates for youth in the foster care system.
The nonprofit Child and Family Advocates of Cuyahoga County runs CASA, otherwise known as Court Appointed Special Advocate, and plans to serve 200 of the 2,200 children in foster care this year, a jump from last year’s caseload of 157.
“Ideally, we’d like to be impacting at least 10% of the child and family services case load at any given time,” said Tricia Kuivinen, the executive director of CASA of Cuyahoga County.
CASA volunteers are community members who go through training to work with children who have experienced abuse and neglect. They’re legally appointed by the juvenile court for a two-year commitment with a 10-hour monthly minimum spent with the child and their families. Cases could include one child or a sibling group. Cuyahoga County has 100 active volunteers.
“In most cases, just by being involved and taking the time, we’ve been able to get everybody into a better situation,” said Dennis Kucler, a CASA volunteer, adding that it is ideal for the child and parents to reunite.
The county had a 39% reunification rate in 2023, an 11% dip from 2022, according to a report from the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services.
“We want to send our kids home when it’s safe enough to do that,” Karen Anderson, the deputy director of the department, said. “Foster care episodes should be brief and nonrecurring.”
While reunification dropped last year, there were slightly fewer children in foster care, according to the report. Anderson credits that to partnerships with local nonprofits, schools and hospitals.
“We really need to support the family,” she said. “Because the family is the one that cares for our kids.”
Other forms of support include job training and access to affordable housing.
How CASA volunteers help
Having a CASA volunteer can reduce a child’s time out of home, according to a recent study by Ohio Colleges Medicine Government Resource Center. Other findings show youth are less likely to re-enter foster care after discharge and more likely to reunite with family or have a permanent placement.
“We know that this model works,” said Beth Cardina, the program director of CASA of Summit County. “We know that the outcomes for kids with a CASA volunteer, they tend to do better.”
All cases have a guardian ad litem assigned, but the more complex situations are where CASA volunteers step in. A guardian ad litem has multiple cases whereas a CASA volunteer has one or two, which provides more time spent with the child. Research done by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University suggests that the chance for recurring cases decreases with a CASA volunteer.
“The goal of CASA is to serve as many children as possible with an advocate,” Kuivinen said. “Then we bring it down to the children that could most benefit from an advocate.”
Being a volunteer
Judi Hill, a retired teacher from Copley and president of the Akron NAACP, has been a volunteer since 2009. She not only wanted to give back from what she learned as an educator, but from what she experienced as a child in a family of seven.
“My mother was divorced, and she was a single mom,” she said. ”She never took any welfare or any of that, but there were a lot of people that helped us to make ends meet.”
Volunteers help coach parents. They look for safety concerns. They talk with other family members to see what’s going on with the child. They attend doctor visits and go to school events. For the custody trial, volunteers write a thorough recommendation of what's best for the child, to stay with mom or dad or live somewhere else, and present it to the judge.
Anyone interested in volunteering can attend a free, in-person information session at the Shaker Heights Public Library on April 18 at 5 p.m. Registration is requested.
