Kishwaukee Sunrise Rotary Grant Makes an Impact
For the past three years, the Kishwaukee Sunrise Rotary has funded a $10,000 community grant focused on children, youth and families of DeKalb County. One 2019 recipient, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), recently provided some feedback on the impact of the grant. CASA provides advocates for abused and neglected children who are involved in some type of legal process. Being an advocate requires a good deal of specialized training and CASA's grant submission requested funding to increase their capacity for training additional, much needed, volunteers to meet the needs of the children and youth of DeKalb County.
From the Director of CASA, Jill Olson, "Thank you again to the Kishwaukee Sunrise Rotary for its grant to CASA. We have begun our Fall Advocate Training Class and I am attaching a few pictures for you to share with your members. Our class has 6 new volunteers and is being taught by 2 of our staff members. The classes include 30 hours of training using the National CASA Association Guided Learning Curriculum which is a new version this year. This curriculum uses a number of video exercises as part of the instruction so the addition of the laptop, monitor and big screen TV has been a great addition and has permitted us to set up the training in our offices. These new trainees will be completing their training in mid November and will be sworn in by the DeKalb County Juvenile Court in early December. Our next training class will begin in the spring of 2020.
We appreciate the support of your Rotary Club in helping us to create the best possible learning environment for our advocates. Effective advocacy for the abused and neglected children in DeKalb County is essential in order to carry out CASA’s mission of a safe and permanent home for these children as soon as possible. Thank you for helping us to do this."
According to Heather Hilleshiem, president of the Kishwaukee Sunrise Rotary Club, "This is exactly the type of local impact we hope to make on our community through this grant each year. We're funding this grant primarily through our annual "Taste of DeKalb" event in September and our hope is that the popularity and success of that event in years to come will allow us to increase the value and impact of our grant."
.jpg)
