The Moral Call to Protect Children with Beth Wilbur

Episode Notes

Transcript

Beth Wilbur:

The average number of placements that a child in foster care goes through in this county is seven. That means they could move six times during the duration of their case, which means all of those new things keep happening. One of our goals is to ensure that that cost of volunteer will be there, will stay with the child throughout their entire journey.

Announcer:

That’s our guest on SideBar today. Beth Wilbur, the executive Director of Monterey County’s Court appointed special advocates known as Casa. SideBar, is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch, we’re back on our journey to discover and highlight people who are making a positive impact in their communities, what we’ve called optimism in Action. Today we’re going to talk with Beth Wilbur, the Executive Director of Monterey County’s Court appointed special Advocates or Casa Casa. Volunteers are appointed by the court to work directly with children who are in the foster care system and advocate on their behalf, but the volunteers aren’t lawyers for the children. Instead, they provide support for the child as they navigate the court system, foster care, and all the disruption that comes with it. I’m looking forward to learning more about Beth’s path and the work that she’s doing now in Monterey County. Beth, welcome to SideBar.

Beth Wilbur:

Thank you.

Mitch Winick:

Beth, tell us a little about your path. We’re focusing this season, not as much on the agencies themselves that provide nonprofit services, but the individuals who are the power behind it, those who actually bring their optimism, their enthusiasm, and their energy to this project. Tell us a little about your pathway that brought you to casa.

Beth Wilbur:

Well, I think my pathway is probably a little bit unconventional because I had a long career in the corporate world. I worked as a publisher in the higher ed publishing space. I worked for a very large global organization. We published bestselling textbooks and media products. I worked in science and I really enjoyed for decades the opportunity to travel around the country, to speak with people who were trying to improve their teaching, to give better opportunities to first gen students. And we worked very hard at the beginning of the transition of a lot of this into the electronic era to figure out innovative ways to make interactive media products to support learning. The higher ed world has been quite disrupted by the avalanche of stuff that’s free online and higher ed companies have gone through quite a bit of transition over the last decade, I would say.

And during one of those periods of transition, there was a pretty concerted effort to downsize and I opted to take a severance package and had a fabulous year on the Monterey Peninsula paid for by my company. So a friend of mine told me about this opportunity as the executive director for casa, and I was very, very intrigued by a couple of things. I was really ready for a much smaller nimbler organization. I went from being a senior manager at a very large company to the manager of a company of 10. And I have been astonished at the way my commitment to the mission has unfolded. I really love working in the community where I live. I love what I’ve learned about our community, and so it’s been a wonderful fit. I’m proud to represent CASA because I know that I’m representing our remarkably dedicated volunteers and we have about a hundred of 20 of them right now who are working individually one-on-one each with a child who is either in foster care or a part of the juvenile justice system.

Jackie Gardina:

Well, and let’s dive into that a little bit more. I think first of all, it’s really intriguing to me that the path is a dramatic shift from your previous work, not just in size and complexity of the organization, but in mission. Although when you first started talking about your higher education role, you obviously had a desire to help those such as first generation students become successful. So kind of giving a leg up to those who perhaps didn’t have anyone to give them a boost in their current families. Do you see the connection between?

Beth Wilbur:

Absolutely. I definitely see the connection. I come from a family of teachers and preachers. I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, which is a town with a lot of pride in its progressive characteristics, its literary history and so forth. I was raised in a community with a lot of belief in social justice and in social service, and both of my parents were very involved with various aspects of town government. And my mother at the age of 92 is still working with a prison education program in the town where I grew up. So I think a part of it is just in my blood. It’s been really interesting to talk with her about what we’ve been doing because unfortunately a lot of youth who exit the foster care system do at some point end up in experiencing some amount of time in the justice system as well.

Jackie Gardina:

And why don’t we just dive into a little bit more. I think Mitch and I are familiar with what a court appointed special advocate may do just based on our own backgrounds, but I’m not sure everyone is familiar with CASA’s work. So what is it exactly that court appointed special advocate does?

Beth Wilbur:

Just to remind your listeners, a child who ends up in the foster care system has been removed from his or her parent or parents due to abuse or neglect. I think frankly the root cause is often poverty. That’s a topic for another conversation. When the child is removed, they are almost immediately subject to a court hearing where their placement is determined by a judge, and oftentimes it’s with a family member with an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent. But immediately after removal of series of dates is kicked off and what happens is the Department of Social Services is responsible for overseeing the case and for determining what services the family is entitled to try to remediate the issues that cause the removal in the first place. It could be anger management, it could be parenting classes. Oftentimes it’s some kind of substance abuse program.

And so there are regular check-ins by the judge to see what progress the parents have been making towards an eventual reunification. The role of the casa, who is a community volunteer who has gone through some rigorous background checks and also some rigorous training is to be a person to stand by that child during experience through the foster care system. Now what that means varies from case to case, but one of the things that we really emphasize is the fact that these kids have been through sort of indescribable trauma simply being removed from their parents. Regardless of the circumstances, they pretty much want to be with their family. And so the role of the CASA is to become a trusted and consistent and permanent presence in that child’s life as they go through the process of living elsewhere, eating different food, maybe having the house smell different, maybe being in a different school.

The average number of placements that a child in foster care goes through in this county is seven. That means they could be moved six times during the duration of their case, which means all of those new things keep happening. And one of our goals is to ensure that that CAA volunteer will be there, will stay with the child throughout their entire journey. And that consistency is huge because many kids in foster care have really been deeply wounded by the adults in their lives not staying with them. And so we really emphasize that consistency and that commitment. I think you can understand why when I say I’m proud to represent our volunteers, I’m very well aware of the commitment that they’re making and the magnitude of the trust that they are trying to build with that child. So specifically what a volunteer then does is every time there’s a court hearing, which is typically every six months, the CASA volunteers are asked to write up a summary of their interactions with the child.

They have been asked to see the child at least twice a month and they have access to the child’s school files, they have access to the child’s therapist, they have access to the child’s caregiver. Their role is to be the voice of the child. Their role is to write a report that says to the judge, my kiddo really wants to spend more time with his sibling who is living in Greenfield or I think that the child is doing well in his current placement, but he really, really wants to play basketball and he needs sneakers or somehow to be the person who personalizes the needs of an individual child so that the judge has a different quality of information when he or she is making decisions about what the best placement is.

Jackie Gardina:

Like so many of the guests on this show, I went to law school because I wanted the tools to create change. If you have that same passion and you want to develop the necessary skills and knowledge in a nurturing environment built for working adults, join us at Colleges of Law with both in-person and online learning options. Take the first step to building a better future for you and your community@collegesoflaw.edu.

Mitch Winick:

Beth, tell us about the type of people that you see step up to this commitment to be a CASA advocate.

Beth Wilbur:

It’s amazing the range of volunteers. We just had s swear in this past week. We swore in 19 new volunteers and I can say without exception, they ran the gamut. We’re always looking for bilingual volunteers for people who can speak Spanish, but all of the court proceedings, as you undoubtedly know, are held in English. Being bilingual allows volunteers to speak more comfortably with caregivers in particular, most of the kids with whom we’re working are bilingual themselves. That’s sort of a role that they’ve evolved into. I would say they’re between 50 and 75. We have many, many people who tell us that they’ve really been interested in doing this and it was retirement that allowed them the time and the focus, but not all. We have a lot of volunteers who are still working full-time. We have more women than men. About 75% of our volunteers are female. We’re always looking for male volunteers. We’re looking for a range of ethnicities and a range of ages and a range of physical locations to the degree that we can because Monterey County is really big. We serve kids all over the county. Sometimes when I speak with certain communities that are kind of surprised to hear that there have been children removed from their town, child abuse and neglect sadly does not seem to correspond to zip code.

Mitch Winick:

I think that’s a really interesting point. We tend to think this is a lower income drug abuse, poor parts of town. The statistics show that that is not the case.

Beth Wilbur:

One of our challenges, as I mentioned, is that our children’s placements often change, and so that can mean that a volunteer could start working with a person who’s placed, say in Salinas and could end up in six months with a child who’s now living in King City. And we try to make it clear to our volunteers before they accept a case that there may well be these kinds of disruptions in the child’s living situation, which part of their role is to support and that may well mean that there’s more transportation or more travel that’s going to be required. We talk with kids after they’ve turned 18 when they are legally adult and there’s less confidentiality concerns about really speaking candidly with them about their experiences and so forth. And the things that they tell us often are that what they most appreciate from their time with their CASA is the fact that they’d never left, that it was somebody that they could really count on.

But then they also tell us that if it weren’t for their CASA and their siblings casa, they wouldn’t have seen their siblings. We have a lot of large sibling groups. It’s not very often that a group of four or five or six kids will all end up placed in the same sort of permanent home. One of the really lovely things that our CASAS can do is have activities where all the kids can see each other, and we have had so many kids tell us that they’d never been to the beach, they’d never been to the aquarium. They’d never gone for a hike in the redwoods to have a chance to go to a birthday party with their siblings. These may seem small, but these are what our kids tell us they remember as the most enriching experiences.

Jackie Gardina:

There’s a lot of people in the kids’ life once they enter into the system, they’ve got foster parents, they might have a therapist, they might even have an attorney representing their interest depending upon the situation. So how does the CASA volunteer work within that larger system? Because in theory, everyone’s working on behalf of the child.

Beth Wilbur:

That’s a really good question and I think that’s also a challenge for us. Sometimes CASAS are court appointed officers sworn in by the judge. They swear to uphold the of the state and the country and everything, but they don’t have real authority. They are advisors ultimately to the judge. Judges tell us that they read the court reports from the CASA volunteers first usually, and if you think about it, the CASA model is one child, one adult, one child, one advocate in the social services department, any given social worker has 20 cases, 30 cases, and the same with attorneys and the same with the therapists, and the same with the teachers and the advisory role. I think maybe it’s better to call it an advocacy role and that’s why we call our volunteers advocates because frequently the volunteers are the ones who are pushing schools to make sure that the QM file is moved from one place to the next school. They are the ones who are ensuring that IEPs are followed, that meetings are held, that if a meeting is canceled, it’s rescheduled. They’re pushing all of these other system partners on behalf of only one child just to make sure that they get the services to which they’re entitled. And all of us know that schools are busy and maybe overburdened and understaffed in some cases. The magic is that the advocate is really understanding what is needed and is not going to let it go.

Mitch Winick:

In some ways, it’s a very unique person who wants to take on this role, but what you’re telling us is it’s not unique as to some specific type of education. They don’t need to be a lawyer. There’s not a specific age type. There’s not necessarily a definition of a demographic type or an income type. It sounds to me like what you’re focusing in on is it’s someone who really is willing to take on one child, and you keep saying that, and I think that’s such a critical part of this. It’s not you’re taking on the whole system. You’re taking on the advocacy role for that one child and as you learn what their needs are better, you’re their advocate. Anytime they need a spokesperson,

Beth Wilbur:

That’s precisely perfect. That’s exactly right. There are a lot of challenges with the system. There are a lot of pieces of it that aren’t working, and the whole CASA model is about 40 years old, and it was actually created by a judge in Seattle who was a dependency court judge, and he found that he was dealing, as you said, Jackie, with this vast array of adults who were coming to a hearing, the attorney for the mother, the attorney for the father, the attorney for the child, the attorney for county counsel, possibly there’s a teacher, possibly there’s a therapist, possibly there are caregivers or grandparents or other people with kind of a vested interest in the child, but that there wasn’t any one there who was only there to stand in behalf of that child. That is kind of the genesis of the model and I think it’s the power of the model. If you’re a volunteer with one kid, I mean you can truly improve the life of that one child. You can really change the path that they’re on and what is more amazing than being able to do that.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school. And schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information, go to monterey law.edu.

Jackie Gardina:

I can think back for in my education experience, my social work experience and pick out a story that just really is, this is the reason why I do this. Is there a story for you of this is why you do this?

Beth Wilbur:

Well, a recent story is one of a volunteer who has been a CASA volunteer for 18 years. She’s had I think four or five different cases in that period of time. And her very first case was with a young girl who was 13. I think she was having a lot of trouble with math. She was doing fractions in school, and so Chris decided that she would teach her how to bake so that they could do fractions, sizing up the recipe, downsizing the recipe and so forth. And they stayed in touch After this young woman returned, she was actually, I think reunited with her mother, but Chris has been in her life for these last 18 years, not as a legal casa, but as a permanent connection. And fast forward now 18 years later, she is a pastry chef at Pebble Beach and we are really proud when our kids graduate from high school.

That’s a place where we put a lot of effort into ensuring that kids do stay in school and we’re very proud when say a young person who’s under the auspices of the probation department concludes the probation, stayed in school, has followed the terms of probation and has now had his record expunged. And we’re happy when families are reunited and we’re happy when infants are adopted. There’s a range of different ways that we celebrate those successes and we don’t always succeed. Jackie, you were asking earlier about the sort of connection of what I’m doing now with what I did previously, and I really do see a big piece of what CASA can do that’s impactful for students kind of cross a continuum of outcomes is really focusing on education. I mean, many foster youth struggle academically, and it’s partly just because they’ve moved around so much they could be in two or three schools in a year. We work hard to help encourage them to stay in school and to graduate because we know that that hurdle, which is considerable for many of them, it just opens so many doors or at least it doesn’t close a lot of doors.

Mitch Winick:

Beth, one of the things we’ve talked about this season is this juxtaposition about who should pay, who should be responsible, and many of the other volunteers and advocates we’ve talked about, relied on public funding for their program to work. Yours is centered around volunteerism. It really is weighed towards the idea of the community itself. Individuals in the community have stepped up to help children in the community, but my guess is that doesn’t solve all of it. How does CASA get funded? How does this work?

Beth Wilbur:

Well, it’s a good question and it’s a very bigger question going forward, I’m afraid in rough terms, we have three primary sources of revenue. One has been state and federal grants, which I believe will probably not continue given a lot of other chaos in the state budget. We’ve already lost some federal funding. The second are individual and business donations, which come in the form of either sponsors for events or end of year contributions. Like everybody. We do a big campaign at the end of the year and then the third are local and sometimes national foundations. I think going forward we need to pivot a little bit and focus more on individuals and businesses to provide the support that we have to shore up some of the gaps that I predict we’ll be seeing. We don’t want to go backwards. We want to sustain the level of service that we have committed to and that we have demonstrated success with. And that is certainly meeting a need. We’ve been requested by the judges to offer this service, but we just need to think differently about how we can sustain this effort going forward. And I do believe there is capacity and that we can do it. We just have to think about it a little bit differently.

Jackie Gardina:

One of the things that people don’t always connect is it’s not just about losing. Let’s say that federal grant, because the federal government has decided to pull back on some of that, some of the other things that are happening on within the economy will inevitably affect business donations. Foundations are going to be strapped because more and more people are going to be coming to them. Individuals are going to be less able to donate money because of inflation or other things affecting their income. So I think it’s important that sometimes we talk about this as a loss of federal funding or state funding without recognizing the ripple effect of what that means for funding generally. And the work that you do is obviously so critical and the implications of pulling that support away from these kids so that they can prosper and go and live healthy productive lives like the pastry chef is such an important goal that we have. Hopefully you’re going to be able to continue to do that work unabated in the coming years.

Beth Wilbur:

I dearly hope so. It also must be said that all of these factors that you’ve outlined will likely increase the need for our services. We’re anticipating increased demand simultaneous to some rockier funding situation. So there are issues that are facing this country and this county that are particularly acute for the population that we serve, and that’s immigration. We have been working with county officials and the immigration task force and so forth to make sure that we have information and support available for families creating a safety plan for their children should, I mean, I’m not aware that anything has happened yet, but we’re sort of on pins and needles.

Mitch Winick:

So Beth, you really put a call out there to remind us that those of us who may not have the time at this moment in our life to actually consider being CASA advocates, we certainly can continue to support CASA financially. We can use the context we have in the community to encourage foundations and businesses and others that are individuals and institutions of means to support the CASA operation. But even more so, you’ve said several times that sometimes it just takes us to pause a moment and say, do I have time in my life to do this? What’s your pitch for those who are right there on the edge and you would like them to make a call to one of, I think almost a thousand CASA organizations across the country? What tips the balance?

Beth Wilbur:

There is a sort of moral call to action to support children who have been unfairly and unluckily put in the positions that they’re in. No child in foster care is there because of anything that he or she did. They’re just the un luckiest kids in the world. And I think that their needs and the opportunity to help one child is very powerful. But I also think that we’re living in a crazy world and we are feeling unbelievably helpless. I find for myself, I stay tight on my pins because I feel as though I am doing a tiny little thing. This is something that I can do that I know can make a small difference or maybe a big difference for a small number of children, but at least if we’re all doing it and we add up all those small numbers, it is something that we can all do to make this world and this country and this county a better and a safer place for children to thrive. To me, it’s been really helpful. It keeps me from being in despair about everything that I’m seeing happening. It’s like this is the one thing I can do. So I guess that would be my closing pitch.

Mitch Winick:

Thanks, Beth. It’s been a pleasure having you on SideBar, Jackie. This has been a great episode. Learning more about court appointed special advocates. As Beth Wilbur mentioned, Monterey happens to be a local agency. There are almost a thousand CASA agencies across the United States. They have almost a hundred thousand volunteers and serve almost a quarter of a million children. So this is not a small movement, but it’s one that clearly has needs that continue to grow. They talk about there may be almost 400,000 children that are in foster care on any given day, and that, as she said, many of these children will rotate through homes six or seven times while they’re in the foster care system. And what Casa does is give each one of the children representing a voice, an adult constant voice. And I got to tell you, if that’s not optimism in action, I don’t know what is.

Jackie Gardina:

Yeah, I have to agree, Mitch. I think one of the things we sometimes feel like we have to do something that makes a big, big splash or creates big change. And when you work with children, you sometimes don’t get to know the impact that you’ve had until years and years later, like the story that she told. And I just think all those people who dedicate the time to spend with those kids, building up their self-esteem, helping them complete school, they’re making such a huge community impact by having a relationship with just one child. And that’s powerful, and we need to remember, that’s all we need to do.

Mitch Winick:

And let’s congratulate Casa of Monterey for their 30th anniversary.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.