Child Advocates Needed - No Legal Experience Required

On any given day, there are 7000 children in foster care in Georgia. Sometimes, all they need is a little support and assistance from a caring adult who will stick up for them, and help connect them with the resources they need.

Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) are trained volunteers who are appointed by juvenile court judges to work with certain children who are in the child welfare system. They are usually not lawyers. Instead, CASA volunteers help ensure that a child does not languish in foster care.

Today, about 60% of foster children have a CASA volunteer advocating on their behalf, but about 2,900 kids still need an advocate. 19 counties in Georgia have no CASA advocates at all.

To learn more about what CASA does, and find out how you can become trained as a CASA volunteer, visit www.gacasa.org. For more information about CASA programs in the metro Atlanta are, click here.

Source: "Call to Service: Georgia CASA" by Angela Tyner, Director of Advocacy and Program Development, Georgia CASA, THE YLD REVIEW, Volume 54, Issue 2, Winter 2012.

NOTE: The CASA logo is registered trademark that belongs to CASA, not to me.

Why You Need an Advance Directive for Healthcare

Thanks to the Georgia State Retirees Association, which invited me to speak to them yesterday about the importance of Advance Directives for Healthcare. Why should you execute an Advance Directive for Healthcare? Here are some of the big ones:

1) It's free. The Georgia Legislature created a form, so you don't have to worry about the language or pay a lawyer to do it.

2) It allows you to die with dignity. We are all going to die, but we will not all have choices about how it happens.

3) It costs you money NOT to execute one. Guess who pays the tab if you are in the hospital in a coma for months? Your estate. This can mean there is nothing left for you to leave your heirs in your Will after all, if they have to sell your assets to pay medical bills first.

4) You might want to override the default decision-maker. If you have an unmarried partner (of any gender), and you want that person to make decisions about what happens to you, you need to name that person as the decision-maker.

5) You want to spare your family the anxiety of second-guessing what you would have wanted. Don't assume your adult children just know what you want -- they might not.

Advance Directives do not need to be notarized, so if you can find two adults who will not benefit from your death, you can execute one right now. Do it.