CASA of Orange County’s vision is one in which every child in foster care that is in need of an advocate has one, and that the child will be given the opportunity to thrive while in the system – rather than just survive. CASA-OC’s goal is to see the following outcomes for every youth served: 1) Increased preparation for and interest in higher education, career and self-sufficiency, resulting in a decreased need for future public support and services 2) Lowered prevalence of school drop-out and higher graduation rates 3) Improved behavior, character development and educational performance 4) Increased self-esteem and goals for the future 5) Decreased probability of experiencing or committing future abuse

CASA of Orange County received both a generous gift from one of our board members, and a government grant allowing us to increase our outreach and recruitment efforts. We currently have over 250 youth on our waiting list, waiting to be matched with a CASA volunteer, but we do not yet have the volunteers ready to serve them. With the dedicated funding, we have been able to invest more in recruitment and have seen an increase in the number of volunteers attending our training classes. The first night of our 2018 July training class had 56 people in attendance, which is the highest number we've seen for night #1 since September 2014. As we have seen success with our refreshed recruitment efforts, our plan is to continue with these efforts until we have the need to increase our staff, allowing us to supervise more volunteers, in turn, allowing us to serve more of Orange County’s foster youth.

CASA-OC currently has 544 active volunteers available to provide advocacy services to youth in Orange County’s foster care system. Our volunteers on average, provide 1. 75 hours of service per week, or seven hours per month, to dependent youth. Each volunteer is supervised either by one of our Case Supervisors (able to serve up to 40 volunteer/foster youth pairs), or one of our Assistant Program Managers (able to serve up to 10 volunteer/foster youth pairs). In order to increase the volunteers coming into our program, which would cause us to increase our supervisory capacity, we have been amplifying our outreach and recruitment efforts. CASA-OC has received specialty funding, dedicated to growing the number of volunteer advocates, in order to allow us to serve more foster youth.

CASA-OC tracks all of our program data through Optima, our cloud-based data management system. Optima is used by 1) our Chief Communications Officer and our Volunteer Recruitment Coordinator to track recruitment efforts, 2) our Training team, to track volunteers both through their initial and their monthly in-service trainings, and 3) our Assistant Program Managers, Case Supervisors, Program Associate and Program Managers to collect both child and volunteer data. In terms of recruitment and growth, through this system, we are able to track all volunteers inquiries, information session attendance, applications, training progress, Case Supervisor matches and child matches. We have the ability to pull reports on all entered data, and compare trends and growth across the years. Recruitment and child match statistics are analyzed on a monthly basis, allowing us to see and track our program growth.

Over the past 33 years, CASA-OC has trained more than 3,250 volunteers who have given over 1,625,000 hours to helping 6,400 foster youth in Orange County. In our 2018 fiscal year, 624 volunteers provided mentoring and advocacy to 693 of Orange County’s most at-risk foster youth, with the following results: 81% of our graduation-age youth either graduated high school, or they received a certificate of completion. Of the remaining 19%, 16% of youth are hopeful to earn their diploma by the end of 2018; CASA-OC has our staff Case Supervisors fill out an outcomes survey on a semi-annual basis. Our most recent outcomes survey showed a great deal of improvement in the lives of the youth that we serve. Of those children who exhibited a change, 71% showed improved behavior in their homes, 69% displayed positive behavioral modifications in school and 76% expressed increased motivation and plans for the future. CASA-OC’s goal is to increase our numbers served to 800 annually in our FY2019.