Right now I am interning at Yamhill County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). I've actually volunteered there since September in hopes of learning more about them before deciding whether I wanted to turn it into an internship opportunity for January through spring, which obviously I chose to do :)
CASA is a special non-profit organization in that it's mostly made up of volunteers who serve as a CASA for a child or family of children. They advocate and give voice to children going through the court system after coming out of an abusive or neglected home. The work that these people do is amazing and I'm so glad to be part of this organization. Here are new volunteers being sworn in by a judge:
With that said, the office I work in is relatively small with just 3 wonderful women maintaining Yamhill County's CASA program, so the work I do is obviously extremely helpful and needed.
In January my main focus was coming up with new ways of recruiting and retaining new volunteers. It involved a lot of data collecting of their current and past volunteers as well as talking with other CASA organizations in Oregon and seeing what they're doing and whether we can implement similar practices. This definitely was a struggle for me since I had to try and come up with fresh ideas, which I have a hard time doing by myself. But nevertheless, it was a great learning experience and I feel because of that I'm able to do a better job in my project for spring.
For spring my work solely lies in advertising for the big annual auction they hold once a year, so the amount of stress and pressure I have is pretty heavy since I want to make sure we sell-out on tickets for the event. The money they raise in that one event goes towards recruiting, training, and supporting our CASA volunteers throughout the year, so it's crucial.
So far I've had a lot of learning opportunities from creating flyers on Photoshop Element (which is a pain!) to actually going out their and talking to local businesses, hanging up flyers, asking for donations and sometimes a chance to advertise on their reader boards (which was and still is super hard for me to do since most of the time the answer is "no" :( ). In researching new ways to advertise I've found out so much more about McMinnville and how it runs, who to ask and contact.
I've contacted local churches, McMinnville Downtown Association, newspapers, the local radio, and it's just been such an awesome learning experience for me so far and I know I'll continue learning more.
If you're interested in finding out more about CASA, feel free to visit them at yccasa.org :)
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