Dear CASA volunteers and friends of Voices for Children Montgomery,
As many of you know, VFCM’s Board of Directors and staff recently developed a six-year growth plan with the goal of providing a CASA volunteer for every child in foster care in Montgomery County by 2026. This will double the current number of children VFCM is serving by 2026. To ensure that we are building on a strong foundation, we recently conducted a survey of current volunteers to get at least a small sense of how well-supported our current CASA volunteers feel and what we as an organization can do to better to support them. I want to share some of the results with you.
We received 60 survey responses-- about one-third of our active CASA volunteers. The vast majority of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they feel supported by VFCM (85%) and that they have access (90%) and positive interactions (92%) with VFCM staff members. An overwhelming majority of respondents (97%) are somewhat to extremely likely to recommend being a CASA volunteer to others.
The survey also highlighted some ways that VFCM can improve our CASA volunteers’ experience! More than one-third of respondents (39%) wanted more information about our overall organizational outcomes and goals and 26% would like additional opportunities to interact with other CASA volunteers on a regular basis. We will definitely be addressing both of these wishes in the coming months! We will be including more information about organizational plans and achievements in the newsletter and making more of that information easily available to your Case Supervisor to share. Our “CASA Connections” in-service training events are one way CASA volunteers are able to interact and offer each other peer support, and we are brainstorming other possibilities. Please feel free to let us know if you have ideas!
There were also helpful comments included by some respondents. Since the survey was anonymous, we are not able to follow up on individual comments directly, but please know that we are grateful for the feedback and that survey comments have been shared with staff.
Thank you to those of you who took the time to respond to our survey!! For those of you who missed it, you will have other opportunities. We are planning ways to more regularly solicit volunteer feedback. We realize (and deeply appreciate) the fact that our CASA volunteers are the heart of our organization and we will continue to work hard to ensure that you have all the tools we can provide to support the critical difference you are making in the lives of your CASA kids.
