CASA After 25 Years

Join us as we reminisce over the last twenty-five years of our organization serving the children of Northwest Arkansas.

CASA Over The Years

Staff & Board

• The first paid staff person was hired in July 1997, part-time Executive Director Melodie Marcks.
• Our staff has a collective total of 179 years of child welfare experience.
• Our Executive Director Crystal Vickmark received the 2020 Kappa Alpha Theta Program Director of the Year Award, chosen from the nearly 900 CASA/GAL program directors nationwide. The recipient of this award is someone who has taken significant actions to establish or expand a CASA program.
• Chris Mitchell, current president of the CASA Board of Directors, is our longest serving board member. He’s currently on his fifth, three-year term since first joining the board in 2004. What a commitment!
• Three of our staff members – Tara Marcom, Sadie Perkins, and Kayla Tave – are TBRI practitioners. TBRI® stands for Trust-Based Relational Intervention®. TBRI helps practitioners meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. The training Tara, Sadie, and Kayla received enables them to train our volunteers in trauma-informed advocacy which focuses on a holistic approach to understanding the needs of abused and neglected children. Approximately 70 volunteers have been trained in trauma-informed advocacy so far.

CASA Volunteers

• Our very first CASA volunteers were a group of 12 sworn in by Judge Charles Williams in October 1997.
• Our longest serving advocate is Margot Martin. She’s volunteered for 20 years and has taken on 18 cases. Wow!
• The average tenure of our current advocates is 3 years.
• The first Benton County volunteers were a group of 5 sworn in by Judge Jay Finch in August 1998.
• CASA volunteers submitted approximately 1,039 court reports between January and December 2021.

Looking at the past four years, our average volunteer retention rate is 82%.

Financials

• One year of CASA advocacy costs less than one month of foster care.
• In 2016 we established an organizational endowment with the Arkansas Community Foundation to support the long-term sustainability of our organization.
• With an eye on the future, we purchased our current office building in 2014 to have space to grow. In 2021, we paid off our mortgage.
• We held our signature fundraiser Light of Hope for the first time in 2009. We raised $71,000 that year. (Compare that to our last in-person Light of Hope in 2019 when we raised $525,000.)