Winnfield Rotary Club members Mary Lou Blackley, Kim Futrell and Bo Walker made a big delivery to the local Children’s Advocacy Network office on South Jones Street on Friday, December 13, when they brought dozens of wrapped and tagged Christmas gifts purchased by Rotary members for children in foster care.
The purchases were made based on the wish lists of the children to be delivered for Christmas by Court Appointed Special Advocates, DCFS caseworkers or Christy King, CAN coordinator for Winn Parish. The club was provided with the ages, genders and wish lists of various Winn Parish children in foster care.
Rotarians shopped for, purchased, wrapped and tagged the gifts with identifying information, and brought them to the Rotary Christmas party to be delivered to the CAN office the following day. The gifts ran the gamut from books to headphones to bicycles. This is the fourth year Winnfield’s Rotary club has played “Santa Claus” for local children in foster care.
Christy King, coordinator for the local office of the Children’s Advocacy Network, was special guest of the Winnfield Rotary Club at its meeting on December 18. The Children’s Advocacy Network [CAN] is a volunteer organization that exists to support and speak on behalf of children in difficult or traumatic home situations. The local office has been open for eight years.
The main focus of CAN is on recruiting volunteers to serve as Court Appointed Special Advocates for children who are the subject of actions brought by Louisiana’s child protection office to have the children declared in need of care so they can be placed in foster care as wards of the state. As Ms. King explained, in such legal proceedings, every interested party—the state of Louisiana, mother, father, and child(ren)—has an attorney to speak for them in the court.
While the children have their own attorney, usually appointed by the court, the attorney focuses on the legal issues in the case and has little time to spend getting to know the children and their individual needs. The Court Appointed Special Advocate system provides children faced with the prospect of entering foster care with a counselor/mentor/friend who gets to know them individually and can speak on their behalf from a personal perspective.
CAN offices provide counselors to interview children alleged to have been subjected to sexual abuse in a warm and homey neutral environment so the experience is less traumatic for the children. They make referrals for therapy, vaccinations, medical and dental treatment as well, and help the Department of Children and Family Services and foster parents providing for all needs of the foster children.
Central Louisiana’s Children Advocacy Network covers seven parishes, including Avoyelles, Catahoula, Concordia, Grant, LaSalle, Rapides and Winn. There are currently 58 children who were placed in foster care while residents of Winn Parish. Some are housed in foster care outside the parish because Winn Parish does not have enough qualified foster parents to care for that many children.
Ms. King reported that her office needs more CASA volunteers, as she has only ten at present. The qualifications require volunteers to be 21 years or older, pass a local, state and national background check, successfully complete the CASA training and commit to at least two years of service as a CASA volunteer.