A juvenile court judge in Seattle had a sinking feeling that he never had enough information to support his daily life-altering decisions about children and their families. So one day in 1977 he asked his bailiff to gather some community leaders to recruit volunteers to spend time with the kids and their parents, report facts that the lawyers and social workers might have missed and recommend whether the court ought to remove the kids from their homes and send them to foster care.
That was the birth of the CASA movement — CASA for Court-Appointed Special Advocates, referring (confusingly) both to the now more than 1,000 programs across the nation that train and supervise volunteer child advocates, and to the approximately 80,000 volunteers themselves.
CASA programs are loved and disparaged, respected and reviled.
Advocates (unpaid in Los Angeles and most other jurisdictions, but compensated in a few) believe they have an opportunity to make a real difference in a child’s life. Numerous books have been written about dangers kids faced from their parents, or judges, or the entire child welfare system, until dedicated advocates averted disaster by standing up in court for their young charges.
Critics paint well-meaning volunteers as clueless amateurs, generally White and well-to-do, who blunder into strangers’ personal lives with little understanding of the structural racism that makes state and local child protection agencies far more likely to investigate and break up Black and Native American families than others, and far more likely to see loving parents as abusive or neglectful because their poverty leaves them with inadequate housing, nutrition, medical care and mental healthcare.
Put another way, critics charge that CASA volunteers do exactly what the rest of the system does: police and punish families for being poor and Black or Native American, instead of providing the services needed to keep families together.
Black kids make up only about 7% of Los Angeles County’s children but nearly a quarter of all foster youths. One 2021 study estimated that 58% of the county’s Black children will be reported or investigated for suspected parental abuse or neglect by their 18th birthday.
“Stranger Danger”
Charity Chandler-Cole did not need a study to alert her to the injustices of the child welfare system. She wrote a book about her experience as a Black teenager growing up in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, about a lawyer unwilling to fight for her, a judge uninterested in helping her, becoming a “dual status youth” in both foster care and the juvenile justice system, being groomed and sex-trafficked by adults at her group foster home, leaving the system only to live in a storage unit, on couches and on a park bench.
She entitled her book “Stranger Danger” to describe all of the supposedly responsible adults who ought to have encouraged and protected her, but who instead exploited and abused her.
“I wish I would have had a CASA,” Chandler-Cole told about 20 people gathered at the Edmund D. Edelman Courthouse in Monterey Park on a rainy February day, just before they took their oaths as members of the latest class of CASA/Los Angeles volunteers.
“Would I have been taken out of my group home in the middle of the night if my CASA would be checking on me tomorrow?” she asked. “Would I have fallen behind in my education, had to do 12th grade over because no one was keeping track of my educational records, no one was keeping track of my medical records, my health?”
But back in 2021, amid the “racial reckoning” that followed the police murder of George Floyd, when the CEO of CASA asked her to consider leading the organization, Chandler- Cole’s response at first was “Hell, no.”
“I didn’t want to be aligned with a ‘White savior’ organization that wanted to save these poor little Black and brown kids from their ‘awful, predatory parents,’” she said.
She reconsidered, and is now the first Black person and the first former foster child to lead CASA/ LA as its chief executive officer. So is Chandler-Cole, 38, now one of the CASA fans, because of an advocate’s purported ability to make sure the system works in the child’s favor? Or still one of the critics, because CASA is part of a racist, exploitive and cruelly hypocritical child welfare system?
She’s both. She proudly describes the organization she leads as the “rebel child” of the national network of CASAs because of its own racial reckoning and consequently its work to diminish the disproportionate impact on Black and Native American families and reduce the total number of child removals.
Working with — and around — Washington
But the era of racial reckoning suddenly feels like ancient history. President Trump has branded diversity, equity and inclusion as “tyranny” and “discrimination.” Foster care is generally run at the state level, and in California is largely run by counties, but now-threatened federal funding plays an essential role, according to Taylor Dudley, executive director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families.
“Federal funding flows through healthcare, mental health, social services,” Dudley said. “It is fundamental to families living in poverty,” and whose children consequently are vulnerable to investigation and removal due to alleged neglect.
Pritzker Co-Director Tyrone C. Howard noted that changes in federal policy could jeopardize collection of race data. “It’s possible that we won’t know who is over- or under-represented in the child welfare system,” he said, making it difficult to identify and correct problems.
CASA/LA was once funded by the Superior Court but is now independent and privately funded, operating in cooperation with the court under a memorandum of understanding. It is affiliated, somewhat loosely, with other CASAs around the state and nation.
Wendelyn Julien became CASA/LA’s CEO in 2017 and brought with her an antiracist, social-justice ethic that began to change the organization. She sat on the Los Angeles County Commission for Children and Families alongside Chandler-Cole, who was serving as national director of contracts administration with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and was the founder and chief executive of a consulting firm. Julien’s commission colleague was also a Black former foster child, and all of that together, along with Chandler-Cole’s questioning nature and fighting spirit, made Julien believe she was the right person to succeed her.
Not everyone was happy when Chandler-Cole got the job and began a series of monthly virtual fireside chats at which she talked about race and racism, immigration, and the particular needs of — and structural discrimination against — LGBTQ-plus kids and parents. Some volunteers and board members told her that her approach was scaring people. Some quit. One said she was triggered every time the new CEO used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.” Some chafed at her insistence that, despite the typical CASA job description, they weren’t actually there to advocate for abused kids — because 88% of kids in the system were not abused but rather suffered what was interpreted by social workers or judges as neglect because of their parents’ poverty.
The larger child welfare system in California was undergoing a similar self-examination. State laws and protocols now promote family reunification and prefer housing children with families — their parents, when possible, or extended family if not, and individual foster families as a last resort — rather than institutions.
Brandon Nichols, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, said the organization had discussions of racial disproportionality going back 15 years.
Nichols also noted that the child welfare system has historically been bad at sharing power, which created tension between social workers and CASA volunteers. He said it didn’t help that much of the stereotype about volunteers rang true: “retirees looking to do some service, but who didn’t have the skill set and were not professional in this world.”
Chandler-Cole instilled not just a better understanding of the role of race in the child welfare system, Nichols said, but also a level of professionalism.
But Chandler-Cole is wary of merely creating a more professional CASA that is absorbed into and sustains the child welfare system. She described herself and her organization as a check on a system that shouldn’t even exist.
“I am an abolitionist,” she said.
There is an obvious tension. Chandler-Cole is, herself, a CASA advocate, fiercely championing a young “dual-status” woman caught up in the system, as she herself once was, making sure the woman has an apartment to move to after juvenile hall, making sure she has what she needs to graduate on time.
CASAs are the only people with court-ordered access to the social workers, the parents, the child’s attorney, teachers, doctors and nurses, to allow them to advocate for the youth. The CASA’s fundamental role has always been advising judges whether to remove children from their families. That puts them in the center of the system that Chandler- Cole said she wants to abolish.
Journalist and author Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition of Child Protection Reform, is a harsh critic of CASAs, as he is of the entire American child wel- fare system, which he and many other abolitionists call “the family police.”
But he said CASA/LA might be different — perhaps — because of Chandler-Cole, her personal experience and her abolitionist approach.
The test, he said, is in the data.
“What we need to ask is this,” he said. “In what percentage of cases where DCFS wanted to remove a child from the home, prolong foster care or terminate parental rights did the CASA disagree? Conversely, in what percentage of cases when DCFS wanted to keep a child in her or his own home, or reunify the family, did the CASA disagree? And after the change in leadership, did those percentages change? And if so, in what direction?”
Put another way, Wexler would measure the value of a CASA program by whether it interrupts family separation. The test is not merely in whether families are affected in a racially disproportionate ways, but whether families are affected at all.
Chandler-Cole does not disagree, but the organization’s data collection efforts have not, so far, reached the question. Nor has Pritzker yet studied CASA/LA, although Howard noted that Chandler-Cole’s approach melds well with DCFS, which has sharply reduced child removals.
Asked how she likes the work, Chandler-Cole delivered a surprising response: She hates it. It’s like climbing a mountain, she said, and sometimes restarting the climb each day. It takes small steps — a lot of them — to reach the top.
And what does the top look like to her?
“Oh, abolition,” she said. “It means people staying together. It means family. It means having a system that does exist that actually helps children that are being abused, that actually helps families that need support, that includes families in the decision making.”
