About CASA

Each day in Washoe County, children are abused or neglected in tragic ways that are often not visible to the public. Sometimes abuse or neglect comes at the hands of parents or guardians, causing law enforcement or social services to remove these children from their home and place them into foster care, often with caregivers they have never met. Each year more than 600,000 children experience foster care in this country. These children are often removed from everything familiar and find themselves in a world filled with social workers, lawyers, and judges making life-altering decisions on their behalf.

Today there are 949 state and local CASA organizations that recruit, train, and support CASA volunteers to serve as a voice for abused and neglected children. CASAs—empowered directly by the courts—offer judges critical information they need to ensure that each child’s rights and needs are being attended to while in foster care. Volunteers stay with children until they are placed in loving permanent homes.

Our Washoe CASA Foundation recruits volunteers to work within the Washoe CASA Program.  The symbiotic relationship between our Foundation and Program helps to provide wide-ranging and particular advocacy to the children in foster care in Washoe County.