Grant Description

We are requesting support for our CASA volunteer recruiting and training efforts to ensure we can replace volunteers we have lost due to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation.

Tracking Metric

Description
Child welfare experts fear children are at increased risk for abuse and neglect due to the pressures many families are under during the pandemic. In addition, many children are no longer regularly in settings (day cares, schools) where abuse is recognized and reported. Both of these factors indicate that as society recovers from the pandemic and resumes some normalcy, we will likely experience a spike in child abuse and an increase in the number of foster children. For this reason, it is vital that New Mexico Kids Matter is able to continue to recruit, train, and deploy CASAs to serve our community’s most vulnerable children. Unfortunately, we have lost approximately 15% of the total number of CASAs we had just prior to the start of the pandemic. Volunteers are leaving for a number of reasons directly related to the pandemic: some are not comfortable with technology and disliked doing their advocacy work in our current virtual environment; others have had to devote more time to at-home schooling for their own children; and some are in high risk categories for COVID-19 and have decided they will not be comfortable doing their work in-person as we hopefully move towards less virtual and more face-to-face advocacy efforts in the coming months. With support from the FHL Foundation, we will be able to continue to aggressively recruit and train new CASA volunteers (virtually now and in-person when the health situation allows) to advocate for abused and neglected foster children.

Goal
50