Blog

Earlier this month, we hosted our second annual CASA Advocate Summit! The Advocate Summit is an opportunity for our volunteers to hear from experts on recent trends and connect with others on how best to support the children and teens we serve. This year, we heard from a father-son duo on navigating their experience with neurodiversity; a service coordinator from Building Bridges, which provides short-term, intensive, crisis-stabilization mental health services and a social worker from Safe Harbor about best-practices around disclosures of abuse.

In addition to our own Advocates from Dane and Columbia County, we invited our neighbors to the south: CASA of Rock County, to join us, as well as foster parents from Dane and Columbia County and volunteers from our supervised visitation program (Parent to Child) - these different perspectives allowed each of our attendees to more clearly see what children and teens under the protection of the courts face, and made for well-rounded discussion!

Before we jump into the full recap, we wanted to say thanks again to our sponsors: Beans N Cream Coffeehouse and Jimmy Johns! Jimmy Johns sponsored our inaugural CASA Advocate Summit and we are so grateful for their continued support of children and teens in our community. So, if you’re in the DeForest area, check out Beans N Cream Coffeehouse’s new location and after - make a day of it - and grab yourself a sub at Jimmy Johns!

Click the title to keep reading...

“The media often portrays trafficking as involving international kidnapping and smuggling, but it’s more likely to happen at home and online. Just like other abusers, traffickers strategically target and groom their victims. They look for children who are vulnerable and easy to isolate, such as those who lack support at home or school, don’t know digital safety practices or have experienced previous trauma. Between 70-90% of sex trafficked kids were sexually abused in a non-commercial manner prior to being trafficked. This link shows that if we can prevent or intervene early in child sexual abuse, we can interrupt the path to trafficking.”

Darkness to Light, a non-profit committed to empowering adults to prevent child sexual abuse shared the above on their Instagram page.

Canopy Center Staff took the Darkness to Light Steward of Children training as part of a comprehensive plan to educate ourselves on how to better support the increasing number of children we serve who have experienced or are at risk for sex trafficking. Currently, more than 25% of the children our Court Appointed Special Advocates of Dane & Columbia County Program serves fall into this vulnerable category, a stark increase from just 5% two years ago. This alarming trend underscores a pressing need to address the gaps in service designed to protect and support these at-risk youth.

Click the title to keep reading...