Court Appointed Special Advocates of Jefferson County will hold a Wine Trail event on Saturday to raise money for and bring awareness to the CASA program, which provides a voice for abused and neglected children in foster care in Jefferson County.
Alicia Knickman, CASA of Jefferson County executive director, said tickets for the Wine Trail fundraiser cost $60 a person for transportation on a charter bus to three area wineries: LaChance Vineyards near De Soto, Wild Sun Winery near Hillsboro and Old Farm Winery near Catawissa.
The ticket includes a T-shirt, an engraved wine glass, three games and attendance prizes.
“We meet at the Jefferson County Courthouse, and we have a bus that takes us everywhere,” she said. “Your price includes the games that we play, and we have prizes with all the games that we play on the bus and we do a raffle basket.
“It’s not a huge fundraiser in terms of making money, necessarily, but it’s good for awareness of all the people we meet who don’t know about the program. And it’s fun.”
Purchases from the winery are not included with the ticket. Preregistration with payment is required at jeffersoncountycasa.org.
“There are still about 14 tickets left,” Knickman said Sept. 25.
Participants will meet at the parking lot behind the Courthouse in Hillsboro at 10 a.m. They will spend 90 minutes at each winery and return to the Courthouse that evening.
This is the third year that CASA has held this fundraiser. The group’s biggest fundraiser is a gala in April.
What is CASA?
CASA of Jefferson County started in 2012 to advocate for abused and neglected children under court jurisdiction in Jefferson County. CASA recruits, trains and supervises adult volunteers who are then appointed by a juvenile court judge to advocate for the best interests of a child in foster care.
CASA of Jefferson County does not receive federal funding. However, it receives money that is funneled through the state’s CASA program, as well as funding from Victims of Crime Act funding and support from the Jefferson Foundation and fundraisers like the Wine Trail.
“We’re always looking to grow our local support, find more local funders, find more businesses, more individuals in the community, because realistically speaking, what we do is specific to Jefferson County,” Knickman said. “We are serving Jefferson County foster children exclusively.”
Knickman said CASA is always looking for volunteers to be advocates, adding that each volunteer is assigned to one child or sibling group.
“We’re around 70 volunteers with a new class going on right now, and we’re already recruiting for our winter class that starts in January,” she said.
Knickman said CASA serves about 20-25 percent of Jefferson County foster children at any given time. As of Sept. 1, about 430 children were in foster care in Jefferson County. In the first quarter of the year, the county had 501 children in foster care.
“Our number one thing is to try to grow the number of volunteers that we have at any given time,” she said. “Because even though the foster care numbers in the state and the county have come down, they’re still stubbornly high.
“More volunteers are always needed. It’s our goal to be able to serve as many of those kids in care as possible.”
Knickman said the children in foster care need as much help and support as they can get.
Volunteers must be at least 21 years old, attend an information session, undergo two background checks, submit three references and go through an interview process.
The actual training, a combination of online and in-person learning, then takes six weeks.
“And all of that is to make sure that you are really ready to do this because you are getting involved in the life of a child who is in foster care, and doing that can make an incredible impact on those children,” Knickman said.
“But we also want to make sure that we’re not doing harm in that process and that our volunteers have the skills, the training and then on the back side, the support to really make that a good experience for them and the children that are in care.”
She said the training does feel overwhelming at first, but once a volunteer does a court observation, “they feel like, OK, I have all the pieces that I can put the puzzle together and I can step into this and be confident in what I’m doing.”
Knickman said the primary goal of being a child advocate is to form a relationship with that child and be a consistent person in that child’s life.
“Because in foster care, children can move frequently,” she said. “There is a high amount of turnover within the foster care system in terms of the professionals involved. They might change (placement and) case managers a lot.”
Knickman said the advocate is part of the child’s foster care team. The advocate takes part in family support team meetings and shares recommendations with the judge.
“We ask that when you train to be a CASA and you get involved in a case, that you stay on that child’s case until that child achieves permanency, which means that they exit the foster care system,” she said. “And that could be a long time.”
Knickman posts details about upcoming information sessions on the Court Appointed Special Advocates – CASA of Jefferson County, MO Facebook page.
According to mocasa.org, Missouri has 24 CASA programs serving 28 of the 46 Judicial Circuits. In 2024, more than 12,000 Missouri children were in foster care, and only 5,000 had a CASA volunteer.