Nonprofit working with foster youth attracts South Bay volunteers
Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA, was one of the nonprofits given a booth at last weekend’s Fiesta Hermosa. Manning the booth were (left to right) City Councilmember Hany Fangary; Camrin Christensen, CASA’s director of volunteer recruitment and outreach; Mayor Jeff Duclos; and Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance). Photo courtesy Robert Smith
Last Friday afternoon, Courtney Wolf attended a high school graduation ceremony. The graduating student was not a family member, but a youth Wolf had been working with as a volunteer for Court Appointed Special Advocates.
CASA, as they are known, is a national organization that pairs volunteers with abused and neglected youth in the foster care system. Wolf, a Hermosa resident who works in finance, volunteers with the Los Angeles County chapter and has been working with the young man who graduated last week for about five years. She said the experience has been “incredibly rewarding,” and opened her eyes to the everyday challenges faced by kids in the foster system.
“He doesn’t have any family in life. In the system, he’s gone from group home to group home, attorney to attorney. I’ve been the only consistent person in his life. I was the only one at his graduation,” Wolf said.
CASA was one of the nonprofit organizations manning a booth at last weekend’s Fiesta Hermosa. Robert Smith, a Hermosa resident, and CASA board member said the organization already has a good base of volunteers in the South Bay, but took up a tent over the Memorial Day weekend to find more.
“Community outreach is one of our new strategies. We have the most compelling mission. Once someone finds out what we do, it’s not a hard sell,” Smith said.
CASA volunteers are assigned to youth through judges at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park. And while CASA volunteers are endowed with legal rights and responsibilities, most of their time is spent in less formal settings than a classroom.
“We’ll get together and go to Jamba Juice and get lunch, and talk about what his challenges are, what help he needs,” said Deborah Patrick, a CASA volunteer and retired Hermosa resident. “I recently spent time working with him applying to community colleges, helping him choose the classes he needs.”
There are currently about 28,000 kids in foster care in Los Angeles County, and almost all of them face daunting challenges. According to the California Department of Education, 21 percent of students in foster care meet or exceed state academic standards in English; in math, the figure is 13 percent. Fifty percent of people who have aged out of the foster care system, meaning they reach maturity without being adopted, are homeless or incarcerated.
For Smith, statistics like these don’t reflect poorly on the foster care system so much as reflecting on the importance of CASA’s mission. CASA volunteers will often confront kids who are disruptive in school and combative toward authority. (The Adverse Childhood Experience study, a landmark study conducted in the 1990s by the Centers for Disease for Disease Control, indicated that childhood trauma can produce enduring medical consequences.) Further complicating matters is that many initially seem unwilling to accept help. This is especially common, Smith said, for teenagers who have been in the system for a while and are convinced that the volunteer is merely another abandonment waiting to happen.
The only solution, he said, is to persevere.
“Just keep showing up. You sit there, and if they don’t talk to you for two hours you say, ‘It was nice being with you, I’m sorry you don’t feel like talking, but I’m coming back next week.’
And then you might sit for another two hours again. But sooner or later, the kids going to think, ‘I guess this guy’s going to keep coming back,’” Smith said.
CASA volunteers agreed that consistency is among the most important virtues of being an advocate. Volunteering at the organization begins with a training program and a rigorous background check. Once approved and appointed by the court, volunteers average about 15 hours a month.
Ashley Koester, a Hermosa resident, and veterinarian, joined CASA after Wolfe, her twin sister, recommended the program to her. She is currently paired with a seven-year-old girl. The prospect of being the only one advocating for the girl’s best interest was daunting at first. But she said that the time she spends with her has become “rejuvenating.”
“I’ve always been appreciative for what I was given growing up, but what you can give back to these guys and how much they appreciate it — they are yearning for someone who is advocating for their best interests. There are sometimes when I think, ‘I don’t really have time to see her, but I want to.’ And I come back so much happier,” Koester said.