Inside the Henn Cty Guardian Ad Litem Office Today

The push to diminish/eliminate the CASA Volunteer workforce of Hennepin County’s Guardian ad Litem Program is impacting office morale for both paid and volunteer GALS. We’ve gone from about 250 volunteers to 32 remaining under new leadership in the last five years.

CASA’s supporting program, CASAMN has over 200 volunteers waiting to be GALs – some of them have been waiting for over 2 years.

Program management has rejected any replacement volunteers (even if they are highly qualified and badly needed BIPOC members of the community).

Management strategy to diminish/end the program has involved poorly explained changes for remaining volunteers.

• Why end taking into consideration skills and experience when assigning cases?
• Why are volunteers no longer able to review incoming assignments and be considered for cases that fit skills and experience? (Eg., working with babies and working with teens are very different assignments).
• Why are volunteers now restricted to two cases? Wouldn’t it be better (for the child and the worker) to let paid staff have smaller caseloads and assign more difficult cases to volunteers that have experience and more time (staffers with 20 or 30 cases are overbooked for hard cases).

Marti has died and we all miss her. She was everybody’s friend and confidant, and she loved volunteers.

*it should be noted that CASAMN lobbied to help grow the GAL program budget to hire more staff GALs due to the number of cases going unfilled.

*New hires find the learning curve long, and results often frustrating. Turnover is high. Volunteer turnover is much lower than new employee turnover.

ALL ADULTS ARE THE PROTECTORS OF ALL CHILDREN

Mike Tikkanen speaks about child abuse/trauma/healing and community

at schools, colleges, workplaces, events, etc.; To learn more:

*send an email to info@invisiblechildren.org with SPEAKING in the subject line.*

Mike’s INVISIBLE CHILDREN book can be read and listened to (for free)here.

• Sign up for KARA’s Free Friday morning E-Newsletter
• subscribe to new chapters of AMERICA’S CHILDREN IN 100 CHARTS here.
• Mike is A KARA founder/Executive Director and founding board member at CASAMN.

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Working with abused and neglected children in Child Protection cases is hard and distressing work for guardians ad litem.

Watching the violence and trauma caseload children are living with can be unbearable. Not everyone can do this work.

New hires find the learning curve is long, and results are often frustrating. Turnover is high.