CASA on the Go: Continuing Education for CASA Volunteers

The minimum sufficient level of care or MSL is a critical polestar for CASA advocacy. How can advocates ensure that we are fully embracing the MSL in our decision-making and our recommendations to the court? Drawing on her legal background as an attorney and mediator as well as her decade+ tenure with CASA, the brilliant Leslie Cocke joins us to unpack ways in which the MSL can be an important safeguard in our advocacy and to explore how CASA volunteers can strengthen their MSL lens. Click here to find the MSL pocket guide Leslie mentions.

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This special episode of CASA on the Go comes from our Distinguished Speaker Series, where we had the amazing opportunity to host conversations with trailblazers in equity and child welfare. In this episode, Kevin Campbell, developer of the Family Finding model, and Texas CASA CEO Vicki Spriggs discuss the role of compassion in child welfare work, and how CASA volunteers can influence the quality of justice experienced by families involved in the child welfare system. View Kevin’s inspirational talk at dss.texascasa.org.

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At Texas CASA, we believe in learning from the stories and leadership of those who have experienced our systems firsthand. In this episode, we’re joined by Renequa Burch, a mother whose family has been impacted by the Texas foster care system in a deeply agonizing way. Renequa’s experiences offer crucial insights about the importance of engaging meaningfully with parents and family members from the very beginning of appointment, the power of effective communication and collaboration, the need to gather information independently and from the source, and the bedrock importance of ensuring advocacy is grounded in the minimum sufficient level of care.

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Our guest Lisa Merkel-Holguin has written that "children and youth, in systems that are designed to serve them, often experience their needs and opinions as being overlooked in the context of planning for them." Join us for part two of this episode featuring Anita Horner and Lisa Merkel-Holguin to learn more about creative and meaningful ways young people’s needs and interests could be better centered within case planning meetings and decision-making processes.

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The CASA guiding principles stress that strengthening families, through recommendations for services, supports, visitation and communications, is in the child’s best interests to achieve stability and/or reunification. In this episode, we reflect on how CASA advocates can help bend the arc of child welfare practice to become more fully strengths-based and family-centered. The wonderful Dr. Natalie Beck Aguilera shares evidence-based strategies for engaging with families and explores why collaborating with family members is so crucial to effective child advocacy. Dr. Beck Aguilera's "reframe game" illuminates how a strengths-based advocacy lens can help us reconsider resistance we might encounter in our work with families, and she draws on her extensive social work experience to share insights about the ways in which our own attitudes impact our working relationships with parents and families.

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