NCJFCJ Board of Trustees Passes Resolution Supporting Recruitment of CASA Volunteers of Color
Listen to the voice of a foster child. Hear Spanish, Ebonics, Hopi, Tagalog, or hear 12 varieties of Chinese dialects or Russian. Those voices resound in unison the richness of noble cultures past and present. The children whose faces hold those voices are as varied as the rainbow and just as beautiful.
Judges depend on CASA volunteers to be a child’s voice in court. But if the translation is lost or if the culture is misinterpreted, this misunderstanding could result in a judicial finding that is not best for the child.
Minority children are over-represented in foster care. The number of CASA volunteers who identify with those racial and cultural groups is disproportionately low in comparison.
The NCJFCJ recognizes that CASA strives to serve the needs of children in a way that truly represents the child’s best interests. That underlines the reason the Board recently passed a resolution calling for aggressive recruitment of CASA volunteers who reflect the racial and cultural makeup of our foster children. The Council is calling on judges to be a part of that effort.
Expanding recruitment areas of our community for seeking volunteers may be as close as our own courtrooms. Consider addressing the jury pool brought in each week. Judges could deliver a “pitch” for volunteers and distribute written applications to join CASA. The jury pool is literally a “captive audience” representing the full community.
Not all methods for recruitment mean the community comes to you. We must go out into the community. This is especially important when we are seeking to increase the number of volunteers of color in our CASA organizations. That means going into neighborhoods and to organizations that target non-traditional volunteers. We must go to the churches and encourage faith communities to enlist the volunteer services of our decent, hardworking citizens. The faith community is a strong resource for volunteer recruitment.
Don’t forget that existing staffs of our criminal and civil courts, police and hospital personnel, law schools, and colleges within our geographic areas all have fertile funding pools for volunteers of color. The parents and grandparents of these workers are all potential CASA volunteers.
We must all make daily efforts to show that the courts support this recruitment effort, even by simply swearing in new CASA members in a ceremony in our courtrooms.
If you have recruitment ideas for volunteers of color, please forward them to the Diversity Committee so we can circulate them around the country. (See below for contact information.) Judges are instrumental in increasing the cultural diversity of CASA volunteers. Now is the time to act.
Reprinted by permission of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Juvenile and Family Justice Today, Spring 2005.
By NCJFCJ Diversity Committee members:
Judges Patricia A. Macias, PMacias@co.el-paso.tx.us;
Wadie Thomas, Jr., WThomas@co.douglas.ne.us; and Thomas Zampino, Thomas.Zampino@judiciary.state.nj.us.
