CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates. The CASA Advocate is appointed by a judge to advocate, or speak for, a child or children in foster care.
CASA began in 1977 when a judge in Seattle decided he was uneasy about making quick decisions that would affect children for the rest of their lives. The judge launched a program to train and appoint community volunteers to research the cases of children who had been removed from their homes for various reasons. Today there are almost 955 CASA programs across the nation with 70,000 volunteers.
A Lubbock County Judge first appointed a CASA advocate to serve as an abused child's advocate in October 1993. Since that time, over 5000 children have been provided over 1000 advocates.
Our advocates serve the children in need as Guardian ad Litem. That's a fancy name for an official court role of looking out for the children's "best interests".
Local concerned community members saw there was a need for CASA. They worked tirelessly to educate our community on the importance of the work CASA volunteers do.
In December of 2000, CASA of Lubbock began expansion efforts into the newly created "South Plains Cluster Court", thus calling for the name change, CASA of the South Plains, Inc. With the assistance of Senator Robert Duncan, the Honorable Kelly Moore, and Texas CASA, we were able to secure funding through the governor's office to expand into the new court. Gradually our expansion has grown to our current standings of recruiting advocates in Cochran, Hale, Hockley, Terry and Yoakum Counties to serve children whose cases are in the courts in each of those counties.
Since 1995, our program has grown from two employees to 13 full-time and approximately 150 advocates. We are governed by a board of directors representing a diverse population of our community, with representation from six counties in the area.
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