CASA for Children of Essex County
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Mission Statement
The mission of Essex CASA is to promote the welfare of children who have been removed from their homes because of abuse, neglect or abandonment by providing a safety net of support, advocacy and mentorship. CASA trains and supervises volunteers to speak up for the best interests of these children in court, to ensure that each child has the opportunity to thrive by receiving needed services and assistance while helping to move the child toward a safe and permanent home as quickly as possible.
About This Cause
The Essex County Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) was founded in 29 years ago in 1986 by a joint task force of The Junior League of Montclair/Newark and the National Council of Jewish Women. Essex County CASA is an independent, non-profit, 501C3 status organization. As of June 30, 2015, we have deployed the services of 1,635 citizen child Advocates to help facilitate the permanency and well-being monitoring for the court for 3,993 Essex foster children. We work through professionally trained and supervised volunteers to promote the welfare of children in Essex County who hae been removed from their homes because of abuse, neglect or abandonment. A CASA Advocate receives a Court Ordered Appointment as the CASA from the Presiding Judge for a specific foster child/sibling group and then serves as that child's "Voice In Court" working to insure that needed services and assistance are made available while helping to move the child toward a safe and permaent home. A CASA Advocate serves as the judge's "eyes and ears" and provides an independent, 3rd party, fact based set of observations/recommendations of needed services and the verification of the delivery of previously court ordered services. Through monthly (or more frequent) visits to the child(ren) in a case, the CASA Advocate is able to verify the child's safety and serve as a link from the Resource parents, to DCPP and to the Court. We are the oldest and largest CASA program in NJ serving 565/2100 (27%)(estimate as of 6/30/15) as of all FC cases in Essex County before the court. Because Essex County is one of the most challenging, underserved, and overpopulated child welfare districts in New Jersey, Essex CASA often serves as a pilot site for new initiatives to be replicated by other CASA programs throughout the state and nationwide. These initiatives have been a necessary response to the ongoing demand from the Family Court that CASA take on increasingly complex and problematic cases that are not being properly addressed by the child welfare system. Essex CASA’s Healthcare Advocacy Initiative, started in 2008 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has now been rolled out to the other 14 CASA programs in NJ. Our Educational Advocacy Initiative (the portion related to Special Education Advocacy) has also been rolled out to our sister programs by CASA of NJ. We were the first CASA in New Jersey to offer National CASA’s Teen Advocacy Initiative, which supports older youth as they “age out” to independent living and combines two signature programs: 1) Family Search & Connect to assist teens who have few or no relationships with their extended family and 2) Fostering Futures, our breakthrough mentoring program. We are the only local CASA program in NJ whose vanguard programs, in the form of pilots that can then be adapted by other CASA programs across the state, are partially funded by the Administration of the Court of NJ to encourage our development of continuous improvement models for CASA-related work to then be taken statewide.