Guardian ad Litem volunteer advocates sought
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on October 5, 2016 10:02 AM
Seventeen-thousand children in North Carolina go to court every year with no one assigned to advocate specifically for them. The Guardian ad Litem program exists to help as many of those young people as possible.
Guardian ad Litem was established by the N.C. General Assembly in 1983 as a means to find advocates for juvenile victims in abuse or neglect cases. Volunteers work with the court system to find the best course of action for the individual children, acting as their personal assigned representatives and making sure their voices are heard.
"Our volunteers work with the courts to help them determine the best interest for the child," said Sebastian Ratliff, Guardian ad Litem program supervisor. "Our goal is to find permanence for kids as quickly as possible."
The program is now looking for new volunteers, and will begin a training session Oct. 12 to train advocates.
In the district eight branch of Guardian ad Litem, which includes Wayne, Lenoir and Greene Counties, there are only four staff members overseeing the project. Volunteer participation is essential to its success.
Guardian ad Litem currently serves around 300 children in district eight. That number is always increasing, with 113 new cases having been added in the last five months. In addition, Ratliff expects pending changes to Department of Social Services policy to greatly increase the number of children entering the system, which will in turn further increase the Guardian ad Litem caseload.
Volunteer training consists of a 30-hour program spread out over five weeks, during which prospective volunteers take online classes and meet in person to learn how to find what is best for the children.
"You're online and you're doing assignments and you're posting and making comments," Ratliff said. "And then us as the instructors, we're replying to those and you're replying to you're classmates and they're replying to you."
The class then physically meets at the end of each week to reinforce what was learned the previous week. The group will occasionally listen to speakers related to the class, such as judges and other community members.
Ratliff said that having volunteers is essentially the only way the Guardian ad Litem continues to function.
"If we didn't have volunteers, we really couldn't do this work," he said. "Four of us couldn't serve 300 kids by ourselves."
The program currently has 155 volunteers in the system, but their level of involvement varies from person to person. While some may take on multiple cases at a time, others do not currently have the time to spend on a case.
"They're active in our system, but every volunteer in our system may not have a case at the moment because they have life things going on," Ratliff said. "It's a volunteer choice as to when your time permits you to take on cases."
Volunteers should expect to spend around eight hours a month on a given case. Volunteers visit the kids they work with a minimum of once per month, but spend the majority of their case time making phone calls, digging for documents and reaching out to providers who may be able to give kids or families the help they need.
"Say the parents are having issues with substance abuse and mental health issues, you may be reaching out to a mental health provider," Ratliff said. "You're obtaining records and things like that, and a lot of that can be done over the phone."
If the October training session does not fit your schedule, another will be held in January. For more information or to volunteer, contact the Guardian ad Litem office at 919-722-6300 or visit www.volunteerforgal.org.