The CASA Connection
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The Power of Consistency
For the past ten years, I have served as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) volunteer. Professionally, I am an education advocate at the Foster Children Evaluation Services (FaCES) clinic at UMass in Worcester. In both roles, I work closely with children whose lives have been shaped by abuse, neglect, placement changes, and involvement in the child welfare system.
Across those experiences, one truth has become unmistakably clear: the most powerful thing a CASA offers a child is not a program, a placement, or a plan. It is consistency. It is connection. It is the steady presence of an adult who does not disappear when things get hard. For children whose lives have been fractured by removal from their homes and repeated instability, consistency is not a luxury. It is the foundation of healing.
A CASA shows up. We arrive when we say we will. We follow through. We pay attention. We advocate in courtrooms and in quiet conversations to reduce harm when systems, transitions, or decisions threaten to destabilize a child even further. Over time, that consistent presence becomes the foundation for trust. And trust, for children in foster care, can be life-changing.
The role is intentionally structured. CASAs are trained, supervised, and accountable to the juvenile court. We are expected to observe carefully, build relationships slowly, and speak up when decisions risk causing harm. That structure allows a child to experience something profoundly rare in the child welfare system: an adult who stays. It exists because legislators, funders, and communities have chosen to invest in it. CASA is not informal volunteerism. It is a court-mandated, professionally supported model that depends on public funding and thoughtful policy decisions.
I served as a CASA for a young woman who aged out of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) custody last spring on her eighteenth birthday. We are still in touch. With her permission, I share parts of her story.
She was removed from her home at six years old. I was appointed to her case when she was fourteen. She spent twelve years growing up in the child welfare system.
In just the four years I worked with her, she lived in eight group homes, six psychiatric units, one intensive residential treatment program, and five Department of Youth Services (DYS) facilities – one of which she remains in today. She had six different social workers. She attended eight schools. She repeated ninth grade three times. She ran away dozens of times, sometimes for hours and sometimes for weeks.
And yet, in the middle of that disruption was a young person with a sharp, sophisticated sense of humor, a love of memoirs, boundless energy, fierce loyalty to her siblings, and an extraordinary ability to survive impossible circumstances. She was strong-willed, resourceful, and relentlessly human in a system often stretched too thin to see her fully.
Much of CASA’s work happens quietly. It is tracking a child across placements, pushing for educational continuity, raising concerns when plans do not match needs, and slowing transitions that risk causing additional harm. Sometimes it is simply asking, again and again: What will this decision feel like to her?
I followed her across the Commonwealth, from southeastern Massachusetts to Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and many places in between. That is not unusual. When children are moved repeatedly, CASAs are often the only constant thread.
When I asked her what she remembers most about having a CASA, she did not mention court hearings or reports. She remembered sitting outside doing artwork and hosing paint off the grass. She remembered me sewing her stuffed animal back together after she ripped it apart in anger. She remembered me showing up to a holiday gathering at a DYS facility when no one else she invited came.
Those memories are not about me. They are about consistency. About care. About an adult who came back, even when things were messy, even when she was struggling, even when it would have been easier not to.
That is what CASA provides in communities across the Commonwealth.
But consistency does not sustain itself. It requires infrastructure. It requires funding that supports staff, training, supervision, and reasonable caseloads. It requires recruitment and retention of dedicated CASA volunteers. It requires public awareness and a sustained legislative commitment to this model of advocacy for a child’s wellbeing and future. This work is not supplemental. It is protective. It is stabilizing. Over time, it can be transformative.
If we believe every child in foster care deserves an adult who stays, then we have work to do. We need more volunteers willing to commit to long-term advocacy. We need sustained funding that reflects the seriousness of the responsibility the juvenile courts place on CASA programs. We need community partners who understand that relational stability is not sentimental; it is preventative. It reduces harm. It improves outcomes. It changes trajectories.
The question for all of us – legislators, advocates, professionals, donors, partners, and community leaders – is whether we are willing to build and protect the structures that make that consistency possible.
That is the work in front of us. And when we choose to sustain it, the impact is felt not only in a child’s present, but in the shape of her future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suzanne Remington has dedicated more than a decade to serving children and families through some of the most complex and challenging cases assigned to CASA Project Worcester County. She brings deep compassion, thoughtful insight, and unwavering commitment to every child she supports as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) volunteer. Suzanne also serves on CASA’s Legislative Advocacy and Program Committees, extensions of the organization’s Board of Directors, to help advance the organization’s mission each year. In recognition of her extraordinary service, she was honored as the Volunteer of the Year in 2020.
In addition to her volunteer work at CASA, Suzanne is an Education Advocate at the FaCES Clinic at UMass, where she works tirelessly to improve school-based outcomes for foster youth. Through direct advocacy and legislative efforts, often in collaboration with community partners, she strives to ensure that young people in care receive the educational opportunities and support they deserve.
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