JUDGE MARGARET PICKARD
Making Valentine’s Day Sweet for Youth in Foster Care
Many youth in foster care have never had Valentine’s Day cards to share with classmates and friends on Valentine’s Day. This can be an embarrassing experience and lead to additional stress and trauma for a child during the Valentine’s season. CASA volunteers have a unique opportunity to guide youth in care to experience holidays through a new lens of love, support, and encouragement.

Schools often provide supplies for younger children to make ONE Valentine’s Day card for a parent, but youth in care often have multiple people who have helped in caring for them and they don’t want to choose just ONE person to give their special handmade card to. Foster youth may still have one or both biological parents involved, siblings who they visits with, grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins who have been more involved in caretaking than the parents, and the members of the foster family, some or all of whom a youth would like to give a special Valentine’s Day card to. It is interesting to think that a simple Valentine’s Day card can create so many loyalty conflicts for a child, but children in foster care often have to face these types of all or nothing choices and this can lead to short-term and long-term loyalty conflicts for them. However, the good news is that CASA volunteers are the perfect support person to help a youth avoid these conflicts!
SHELIA PARKS, CASA Program Administrator
Help Recruit More CASA Volunteers
As we embark into 2022, the CASA program continues to amplify its volunteer recruitment and retention efforts, so that more abused or neglected children in foster care can benefit from being matched with a CASA volunteer. In 2021, the CASA Program supported a total of 444 CASA volunteers and provided guidance to 1,100 children in foster care. However, only 714 of those children were successfully matched with a CASA volunteer to help them on their journey toward permanency. We need your help to find more individuals who would like to make a lifelong difference in these children’s lives.  
 
In 2021, thanks to a grant received from National CASA/GAL Association for Children, our Program utilized paid media to help raise awareness about CASA’s need for more volunteers. Although we are proud to say that the three month media campaign provided great outcomes, with the number of volunteer inquiries and applicants almost doubling from previous years, we realize that we have to do more to address this crisis for our community’s foster children. 
Become a CASA Volunteer!

Are you interested in becoming a CASA volunteer? Maybe you know someone who would be a terrific child advocate. Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) volunteers are assigned by the Judge to advocate for the best interest of a child in foster care. Free informational meetings are scheduled (virtually) four times every month.
CASA Program of the Eighth Judicial District Court | 702.455.4306 |
601 North Pecos Road, Las Vegas, NV 89101