COURT APPOINTED SPECIAL ADVOCATES OF MERCER COUNTY INC

CASA's goals are to provide a CASA volunteer to every Mercer and Burlington Counties child living in out of home placements who needs one. It is our goal to shorten the time they are in the child welfare system, to obtain needed educational, medical, mental health and recreational services while living in out of home placements, and our ultimate goal is to find them safe and stable permanent families and homes.

We provide intensive pre-service and in-service training for our volunteers to teach them how to advocate; we provide excellent case supervision for each advocate to guide their efforts and troubleshoot when issues arise, and we work hard to have collaborative relationships with both the staff of the Court and Division of Child Protection and Permanency.

We have build the infrastructure to expand the number of children we serve each year. We have a strong staff and board who are dedicated to serving the children and providing them quality advocacy services.

In the nearly 15 years we have been in existence, we are now serving over 300 children annually with nearly 200 volunteer child advocates. We would like to grow approximately 10% each year to increase the number of children we can serve. We are working hard to recruit more volunteers, who have to make a committment of at least 12 months to the child. Advocates spend approximately 10-15 hours of their time on each case monthly. We would like to recruit more volunteers in both counties and are always looking for new strategies to let people know about this very meaningful volunteer opportunity.