A Little Extra for the Holiday Season

By Carol La Valley

Photos courtesy of organizations

The ability to create an emotionally healthy environment is a gift that comprises the givers as well as the receivers. People who advocate for children, the homeless, and animals share a common caring heartbeat.

Consider that when a child enters the court system, it is often through the inappropriate actions of his or her parents. The child’s experience is stressful, frightening, and always heart wrenching. A court-appointed special advocate, or CASA, comes into a child’s life when a judge believes that abuse or neglect exists. Each CASA volunteer establishes a rapport with the assigned child, meets with the people in the child’s life—teachers, foster parents, grandparents, friends, counselors—and then reports their findings to the judge.

“Many judges have told me that they read the CASA report first,” says Justine Grabowsky, a program-development specialist with the Maricopa County CASA Program. “Because our program is made up of unpaid ‘fact finders,’ judges expect the CASA volunteer’s report to be an independent and objective assessment of the child’s situation.”

CASA volunteers receive polygraph and criminal background checks. They receive 32 hours of training before they make at least a one-year commitment to their assigned children. There is a steady need for CASAs throughout Arizona, especially bilingual ones. Being able to speak with the child and the family without an interpreter builds rapport faster. “Hispanic volunteers also provide Hispanic children with a level of understanding of their cultural traditions and a value of their heritage that non-Hispanic volunteers cannot,” Grabowsky says. In Maricopa County, fifteen Hispanic volunteers are serving seventy-three children.

Find out more about CASA at maricopacasa.org. (602) 506-4083 or volunteer@maricopacasa.org.

Shoebox Ministry has a goal: Collect 40,000 pairs of new socks by December 18 for distribution to the homeless through Valley shelters by Christmas.

Since 1988, Shoebox Ministries has given Valley homeless the means to wash, shave, and brush their teeth with boxes made for families and individuals. Shoebox presently receives requests for more than 1,000 boxes per month—up 200 from past months—but donations are down.

Program director Laura Borgeson would rather have a $20 donation than have someone spend that same amount for items at the dollar store—she can stretch the money further. “We have to use limited, valuable funding to purchase toiletries,” she says. “I can purchase deodorant in bulk for 30 cents each.” The current need for hotel toiletries is a different matter. They’re the perfect size for a box going to a single person, but travelers who drop the tiny soaps, shampoos, and lotions off report that hotels are not passing them out as freely as they did before the economy went south.

Borgeson encourages schools, churches, and businesses looking for a service project to participate by making up the hygiene kits that fit well in a shoebox. It’s a grassroots effort gone global. “I answered a request for an organization in South Africa asking how they could start a shoebox ministry in that country,” she says.

For a complete shoebox recipe and information, log onto shoeboxministry.org.

Food, collars, leashes, and litter for the family dog or cat cost money. With the recent spate of home foreclosures, forced pay cuts and layoffs, many pets suffer abandonment by their owners. The discovery by Realtors of the lonely, starving pets in foreclosed homes was the beginning of Lost Our Home.

“It takes about two months to place a pet with a good home, because shelters are full,” Jodi Polanski, president of Lost Our Home, says. “People don’t realize that it is a felony to abandon a pet if that pet becomes hurt.”

LOH fields calls by people trying to locate pet-friendly rentals, proactively adding a service to their Web site where Realtors and others can list this type of housing. The Realtors donate their time, and their commissions pay for the pet deposit.

The nonprofit also makes a difference with short-term gifts of food and nonemergency medical financial aid and offers foster care and adoption programs. LOH’s food bank sees an increase in need for food and litter during the holidays.

lostourhome.org