Dawn Lutz, 63, of St. Charles, started volunteering with CASA Kane County as a legal advocate for children in foster care at the encouragement of a friend who was also looking to support the program.
A retired elementary school teacher, Lutz first got involved this past November, and says her career in large part informed her desire to help.
“You see those kids that struggle, and often there’s more going on than you realize in the classroom,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to help in a different way.”
Now, she and her friend regularly visit the children they represent, go to meetings at their schools, visit the children at their foster homes and ultimately write up reports making recommendations to the judges deciding the kids’ cases. She said the time they spend with the children they support varies, but probably amounts to two to four hours a week.
Lutz was one of the more than 100 community members who gathered for CASA Kane County’s “Hands Around the Courthouse” event in Geneva on Thursday.
“Hands Around the Courthouse” is an annual gathering held in observance of National Child Abuse Prevention Month, according to a press release from CASA Kane County.
The event, which took place at the Kane County Courthouse in Geneva, was intended as a reminder of the need to protect abused and neglected children and raise awareness of the effects of child abuse, the press release said.
At the event, community members joined hands in a circle at the courthouse and held a moment of silence for victims of child abuse.
CASA Kane County is a nonprofit organization that advocates for children in foster care through the advocacy of Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA, volunteers, group officials have said. The nonprofit recruits, trains and supervises volunteers who represent children in the foster care system in juvenile courts, according to its website.
CASA volunteers are Guardians ad Litem, meaning they act as legal advocates for children under the care of the courts and make recommendations to judges.
Kane County Chief Judge Robert Villa, who spoke at Thursday’s event, described how court cases are about settling disputes between parties, but the CASA program offers a unique form of help in the deciding of a case.
“Rarely do you have an opportunity for an expert or somebody who speaks for the ‘who’ we’re deciding on to … provide you necessary information,” Villa said.
Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser described how CASA volunteers “get on eye-level with the children, and they listen.”
“Sometimes just a smile from somebody, an encouragement from someone and even someone saying, ‘You are safe. You can go to sleep. You don’t have to worry about what’s happening to you,’ may seem like a small thing,” Mosser said about the work CASA volunteers do. “But it’s the best thing that they can give you.”
Addressing child abuse has been a central goal of the local courts in Kane County in recent years, officials said.
CASA Kane County’s partnership with the local courts predates, but works alongside, the county’s child exploitation task force launched in 2022, Mosser told The Beacon-News.
At the event, Mosser described how Aurora and Elgin had trained investigators who could look for cases of child exploitation – possessing or disseminating child pornography – but smaller communities like St. Charles and Geneva didn’t have the resources to do the same.
Funding from Kane County enabled the task force to hire investigators, forensic analysts and prosecutors to handle child exploitation cases, Mosser explained. She said they arrested 20 people in 2023 and 31 in 2024 for child pornography-related charges.
CASA Kane County advocated for 668 children in court last year, according to its website, more than 70% of whom were under 12 years old.
Gael Hanauer, 74, of North Aurora said that demand for local volunteers remains high. She estimates there around 200 volunteers, most of whom only handle one or two cases at a time.
Hanauer has been working as a CASA volunteer for the past 13 years as a way to give back to the community.
“I was blessed in the way I was raised,” she told The Beacon-News on Thursday. “We didn’t have to deal with some of the things these families are going through.”
She noted that their work as volunteers is not isolated, and that maintaining relationships with the other organizations involved in a child’s case – like their case worker at the Department of Children and Family Services – is an important part of the advocacy they do.
“If you forge a good bridge with the case worker, then you’re on the same wavelength, you’re on the same page,” Hanauer told The Beacon-News at Thursday’s event. “It’s important if you go to court saying the same thing … having the same goals in mind for the children.”
In addition to their legal advocate services, CASA Kane County’s Executive Director Jim Di Ciaula said on Thursday that the organization is working with other area organizations to provide additional support to children in the foster care system.
Di Ciaula noted that the organization has recently formed an advisory council with local health care, education, legal services, child welfare, law enforcement and nonprofit organizations, according to a statement from CASA Kane County. Next week, they’re launching a pilot program focused on assisting children 14 years old and older, he announced at the event Thursday.
“Maintaining the status quo should not be acceptable,” Di Ciaula said at Thursday’s event. “And we strongly desire to reduce the number of cases and children in foster care and believe there is not only an opportunity but also a responsibility for our collective community to do so.”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com