CASA Updates

  Of course around Father’s Day my mind drifts towards thoughts of my dad.  He moved into his heavenly mansion on May 18, 2014.   After a short, but long, five month battle with cancer, the horrid disease took his life.  At this time I had already been pondering volunteer work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate.  This life altering tragedy just spurred me on. As I navigated my own grief as well as the grief of my mother, I realized that...

  Jody and Forrest Crowl Meet Jody and Forrest Crowl, both CASAs—Jody with CASA of Yellowstone County and Forrest with CASA of Missoula.  As a mom/son dynamic duo of advocacy, Jody is just one of our Yellowstone County CASAs with a family member who is an advocate with a program elsewhere. Forrest led the way into advocacy.  Having been inspired by one of his law professors, Forrest became a CASA first.  And after hearing about his experience and from a friend who was...

One of the tools used by Department social workers as they strive to keep families whole is the family engagement meeting, or FEM.  An FEM is a unique opportunity to bring together the adults in the child’s life, and sometimes even the child once the child is old enough, to hash through the issues before them. An FEM is one of the “firsts” that a CASA’s peer coordinator or program coordinator will attend with you.  But if it’s been a while...

In January 2017, four Native Americans from Pryor drove to Reed Point to attend a basketball game.  They reported being denied entry to the game until a group of white Reed Point people were allowed into the school gym.  Although the Montana Human Rights Bureau subsequently found that there was no discrimination, merely a misunderstanding, it’s worth asking why such a story connects with another, more recent one, this time from Colorado. In early May, two young Native American men drove...