2026 CASA State of the Union
Melynda Jamison
Hello CASA Volunteers,
2025 was a record-setting year for CASA of Lexington, thanks to the hard work YOU put in advocating for vulnerable children.
As we start a new year, I’d like to look back at what we accomplished in 2025, talk about some themes we heard from you through two volunteer surveys, and tell you what we’re excited about in 2026.
We plan for this “CASA State of the Union” to become an annual tradition. It’s a great way to ensure that we are listening to you, celebrating your successes, and providing solutions to any barriers that lessen your CASA experience or impede your work on behalf of abused and neglected children.
Sincerely,
Melynda Jamison, CASA of Lexington Executive Director
Results from 2025
Last year, 260 CASA of Lexington volunteers advocated for 685 children — the most children served in a year in program history! That includes 291 newly assigned children on 119 cases. We also set a record with 81 newly trained volunteers!
What You Told Us
At the end of 2025, we sent you our annual volunteer survey, gauging how satisfied you are with your CASA experience and asking where you could use more support. Earlier in the fall, you also participated in a quality assurance survey from the Kentucky CASA Network. Below, we are sharing some of what you said and providing responses in three categories: things we can’t do, things you may not know, and things we are doing in 2026.
“I feel blessed to be a part of the CASA organization. I continue to learn as I serve. Everyone is so helpful and knowledgeable.”
What you Said
You overwhelmingly told us you value the support you receive from your Volunteer Managers and the CASA staff. You also said your preservice and continuing education trainings have been generally useful, though there were requests to modify or improve preservice training — more on that in a moment.
“I have volunteered through the years with many different organizations and have never felt as appreciated as I do with CASA.”
As part of the Quality Assurance survey, we were also able to see some common themes among CASA volunteers’ favorite things and least favorite things. Here are a few:
What are our CASA volunteers’ biggest inspirations as they do their work? You said 1) the impact you have for kids; 2) getting to interact with kids; and 3) giving back to your community.
What about CASA volunteering brings the most delight and joy? You said 1) spending time with kids; 2) causing positive outcomes for your CASA children; and 3) getting to see kids grow and develop.
What are the biggest challenges or struggles CASA volunteers face? You said 1) working well with biological family members; 2) working well with the cabinet; and 3) writing your court reports.
We also identified some common training requests you have, based on our annual volunteer survey: 1) More refresher CEU classes on court report writing, the TPR process and preservice training; 2) lowering the required number of CEU hours and increasing the number of reading hours that count for CEU credit; and 3) easier access to CEU training options.
“I would like (CEUs that) dive deeper into relationships not only with the children but with their family members and foster families. Sometimes these relationships can be tricky for a CASA to navigate.”
Things we can’t do
We cannot modify the rules around preservice training to record in-person trainings or mix-and-match in-person and online classes. We also cannot change the requirements for annual CEU hours or the 4-hour limit on reading hours. These requirements are set at the national level and so are unfortunately out of our control.
However, we are addressing these concerns as best we can — see below!
Things You Might Not Know
We always hold a volunteer panel on the final night of preservice training. If you missed that session during your training, or you would like to attend again to hear from experienced CASA volunteers, just let us know you plan to attend by emailing info@casaoflexington.org. The volunteer panel night for our winter training class is scheduled for 5:30-8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19.
We collect CEU opportunities on our Continuing Education page, which is accessible by bookmarking the page or visiting your Volunteer Dashboard. This is also where you’ll see our in-house CEU opportunities and CASA book club meetings as they are announced. CASA of Lexington’s regular news and updates emails and the Kentucky CASA Network’s quarterly volunteer newsletter are two other ways to find out about upcoming and on-demand CEU opportunities. By serving as a CASA of Lexington volunteer, you should already be receiving our update emails. If you aren’t, you can check your spam folder. If you still can’t find them, email info@casaoflexington.org and we can look into why you aren’t receiving them. You can sign up for the KCN quarterly volunteer newsletter here. You can also always ask your Volunteer Manager for help finding CEU opportunities that are relevant to your current case!
Whenever you have a court hearing in your child’s case, you can observe the cases called before and/or after your case and count that time for CEU credit. This is one of the easiest — and often most valuable — ways to get CEU credit!
Our Fayette County office and all the resources there are available to all of our CASA volunteers from all of our counties all of the time. This includes the collection of toys you can bring on home visits, the volunteer lending library, our Little Free Library, the Volunteer Relaxation Room, and swag available for purchase in the CASA Shop.
We have CASA yard signs available at the Fayette office, which you can put up to help raise awareness and find more CASA volunteers. These have been very popular and we still have some remaining!
We began running a paid ad campaign in 2025, which is continuing through the first quarter of 2026. Seven different 30-second ads are running on streaming TV services, WKYT, LEX-18, and many other places. We are also sharing the videos on our social media. These ads are proving quite successful for our own program, and they are even generating volunteer inquiries for other CASA programs in the TV stations’ coverage areas. The ads are intended to interest people who already care about child welfare and want to make a difference, but are looking for something that requires less commitment than fostering children in their home or becoming a social worker or attorney. You can see some of the ads on our Facebook page: here is one, here is another, and here is a third. You can help us boost the effectiveness of this campaign by sharing these videos, too!
You can earn this baseball T-shirt or one of several other styles by recruiting a new CASA volunteer!
Speaking of recruitment, we have a new incentive for recruiting CASA volunteers: a stylish Kentucky word-cloud or outline shirt! If you help recruit someone who goes through training and takes a case, you can have a free shirt in your pick of style and size. Style options are a baseball T-shirt, a crewneck, a green T-shirt, or a blue T-shirt.
Things We are Doing
A new web-based court-report writing tool will launch for all CASA of Lexington volunteers on July 1, 2026, if all goes as planned. This will allow you to fill out your court report like you’re completing a form, get feedback from your VM, and generate a final report that matches all the formatting requirements of our judges. Another CASA program pioneered this tool and they are using it very successfully. This will be an optional tool for volunteers to use instead of typing up a report in Word.
We are now offering on-demand trainings for very small groups of new volunteers, with class schedules built around the participants’ calendars. This is a great option for anyone you’ve tried to recruit but who can’t make our more traditional training schedules work.
This year is CASA of Lexington’s 40th anniversary! We are celebrating all year long and with a special Volunteer Appreciation event at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 17, at LockRidge Park in Garrard County. This event is replacing our usual Volunteer Appreciation Fall Festival. It’s going to be bigger and fancier than our fall festivals! But space is limited. All active CASA volunteers are being invited, and you can bring up to one additional guest with you. If you plan to attend, RSVP sooner than later in case we run out of seats.
We are offering multiple CASA social events again this year, including this State of the Union, which is going to become an annual tradition.
On April 21, we will have a social dinner at BJ’s outside the Fayette Mall, starting at 6 p.m.
On June 26, we will attend a show at Pioneer Playhouse, the outdoor theater in Danville. A pre-show gathering with appetizers will begin at 7 p.m.
On Sept. 29, we will have a social lunch at Parlour Pizza, starting at 11:30 a.m.
You can RSVP for all of these events by emailing info@casaoflexington.org.
The CASA Boosters is a program that launched in 2025 and we are continuing it this year. Boosters receive texts once or twice a month with links to social media posts from CASA. They like and share these posts to help boost CASA’s visibility. If you’d like to participate, email info@casaoflexington.org and let us know the email address and phone number you’d like to be contacted at. Your friends and family members are welcome to participate!