with age-appropriate items: a blanket, a stuffed animal, a book that’s age-appropriate, hygiene items (including diapers for kids who need them), socks and other items. The organization also regularly helps provide kids with things like sports gear and gifts for birthdays or Christmas. Now many of those items have been moved to storage lockers — which, while still an expense, are cheaper than office spaces — or in the case of Baker County, to a much more packed storage area. “I mean, is it inconvenient to have to go get stuff, you know, out of a storage unit? Yes, it is. But it’s necessary right now. The Baker office, because it was downsized it looks like Santa Claus threw up in there,” Collard says, laughing. “It is so jam-packed.” CASA of Eastern Oregon has also cut its budget for volunteer recruitment — canceling billboard and newspaper and print ads — due to budget cuts. Fundraising from the private sector is a challenge, Collard notes, with fewer businesses in the communities her organization serves — and the fact that CASA of Eastern Oregon must compete with so many other organizations for donations. But, Collard says, local businesses in the counties CASA of Eastern Oregon serves, have stepped up, and says in recent months the organization has received a $90,000 grant from Braemar Charitable Trust, as well as grants from Ford Family Foundation and the Roundhouse Foundation.” “The businesses around in all of our towns, they’re hit up by everyone,” Collard says. “That makes it difficult, and therefore, it doesn’t make it impossible.” Where CASA organizations in more-populous areas may bring in six figures at a fundraiser, her organization was thrilled to bring in $4,000 at a cornhole game in Ontario. “People here love cornhole,” says Megan Van Zelf, the outreach manager for CASA of Eastern Oregon, who is based in Malheur County. “We have a silent auction. We did a snack bar. It’s not only a fundraiser, it’s also trying to raise awareness, trying to get our name out in the community. Fortunately, we have built some pretty good community partnerships over the years, but we’re always trying to do better.” COLLARD IS THE LONGEST-SERVING CASA director in the state of Oregon. Before she started working for CASA Baker County as staff, she was a CASA volunteer herself. Before that, she was a foster parent and a stay-athome mother. (Foster parents are now called resource parents, Collard notes.) She had had a number of foster children in her care over the years, but most did not have CASAs. Then she happened to take in two children who did have advocates and was “blown away at the difference — how smoothly their cases went, how I felt like the children had another voice besides just mine.” “A lot of people don’t understand that when you are a foster provider, you don’t get all the information. You don’t get any of the legal information, anything like that,” Collard says. “You get whatever [the Oregon Department of Human Services] shares with you, but a CASA has all of the legal documents. They have everything, the same as the attorneys do, as [the Child Welfare Division] does. They are party to the case. And therefore, the CASA can have a broader picture of what’s going on in the situation.” And while Collard’s work is mostly supervisory and dedicated to the big picture, her commitment to the small picture is what keeps her committed — and hopeful. “I’m not doing it to be a martyr or anything like that,” she says of her willingness to work for a fraction of her former pay. “I simply do it because I believe in our mission so much that I know we’ll get everything built back up and be normal again.” Early in her time in Baker County, she says, she remembers sitting in court and listening to attorneys go back and forth, referring to the youth whose case they were discussing with male pronouns. “It was one of those names that could be a girl or a boy,” Collard recalls. “And I finally stood up and said, ‘Your honor, this is a little girl.’” “Something that stays in the forefront of my mind is a quote by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, who wrote a book called Three Little Words — a former foster child and now a very wellknown author and speaker,” Collard says. “She states that every child deserves to have at least one person who knows the color of their eyes. And I use that a lot with their advocates, because it is important.” JASON E. KAPLAN Megan Van Zelf, left, Malheur County outreach manager for CASA of Eastern Oregon, and Mary Collard, its executive director, in the Malheur County Courthouse in Vale 37
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