Court Appointed Special Advocates of Santa Cruz County

We enter our 25th year of service to children in foster care in Santa Cruz County with the long-range goal of serving all 300 children identified by the local dependency court as needing a trained child Advocate. For fiscal year 2015/16, CASA served 254 children and youth in foster care.
Each year in Santa Cruz County, California, over 500 children are served by the dependency care system. Because of new state legislation adopted in 2012, services are now being extended to qualifying youth up to age 21. We know that a growing number of older and transition age youth will remain in care and be in need of Advocates. We expect that over the next two years, 24-26 of the older teens we are currently serving will remain in care past 18 and retain their Advocates. This means a minimum of 36 youth who would have previously aged out will remain in our program. We want to continue serving them while accommodating the steady flow of new children entering the system. In 2016, CASA added its Birth to 5 program. We are now serving children in foster care throughout the full age spectrum, from birth to age 21 years.

Our strategy is to focus resources on the recruitment, screening, and training of 90 new volunteer Advocates in fy 2016-17. This would represent a more than 50% increase in new Advocates over the preceding year. While this is an admittedly aggressive goal, we have laid the organizational groundwork to achieve it and are confident in our ability to do so with the help of donors. Within our goal of recruiting 90 new volunteer Advocates is the goal to increase our percentage of both male and Latino volunteers by 10%. Of 900 new Advocates, our goal is to ensure that 28 will be men and 28 will be Latino.

Utilizing proven and new strategies, our Outreach Coordinator and other staff will carry out the following activities;
Frequency Total/Yr Advocates Recruited
Advocate Peer Referral Campaign Ongoing 4 events 18
Presentations and Orientations 6 x mo 72 35
Individual/small group appeals 4 x mo 48 22
General Outreach Monthly 12 15
Advocate Trainings 4 x year Total: 90 Advocates recruited and trained

Over the last two years we have built a foundation of readiness to increase our capacity to serve more children.
1) We hired a new Outreach Coordinator and re-focused her role on specific activities that will help reach our aggressive recruitment target, while increasing the number of male and bilingual/bi-cultural volunteers. (Forty-nine percent of our youth are Latino and 51% are male.)
2) We are identifying and utilizing broader methods of outreach to increase CASA visibility, including more extensive use of social media and technology.
3) We increased annual trainings from 3 to 4, with a capacity of 20 per class.
4) Our preparations to supervise more Advocates to serve more children have included: a) increasing Supervisory capacity from 3.5 to 4.3 FTE; b) hiring a full-time Volunteer Coordinator to handle tasks formerly done by Supervisors; c) using interns to take notes in court and manage our wait list and; d) developing a pilot program for experienced volunteers to serve as "team leaders/peer coordinators." These steps have increased the capacity of Supervisors to each support more than 30 Advocates.

Our success will be judged according to whether we have recruited, trained and sworn in 80 new Advocates and increased the number of children we served from 220 to 260 this fiscal year. Progress against our demographic goal within the overall recruitment goal will be evaluated according to our degree of success in increasing the numbers of men and Latino volunteers by 10%.

The Outreach Coordinator, Program Manager, and Executive Director will participate in the design of the metrics tools, data collection, and final evaluation.