Those Who Serve
Short profiles of the Jefferson County neighbors who answer the call in public safety, social work, and community care.
Donna Goede
Treasurer, CASA of Jefferson County Board of Directors
For Donna Goede, service through Court Appointed Special Advocates is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: children in foster care deserve someone who is there for them, listens to them, and helps make sure their voice is heard.
Goede has served on the CASA board since August 2019 and currently serves as treasurer. Her connection to the mission comes from a lifetime of working with and caring about children. Before joining CASA, she spent nearly 30 years as a school counselor, including time in schools where many students faced difficult family circumstances, poverty, instability, or other challenges outside their control.
CASA, Goede explained, is a volunteer organization that serves children in foster care by providing trained adult advocates who can stand beside them during one of the most difficult periods of their lives.
“A voluntary organization that services children in foster care by providing an adult volunteer who has been trained to act as their advocate and their voice in the situation that they’re in,” Goede said.
CASA volunteers go through training to better understand the foster care system, the legal process, and the needs of children placed in state care. Once assigned to a child, or sometimes to siblings, the volunteer visits with them regularly, attends court, and submits reports to judges to help ensure the child’s perspective is part of the conversation.
For Goede, that role matters because foster children often have very little control over what is happening around them.
“These children truly, truly have no choice in what’s happening with them,” she said. “They had no choice when they were taken from their homes.”
Even when a home situation is unsafe or unhealthy, Goede said, it is still the world a child knows. Being removed and placed into a strange home, sometimes more than once, can be deeply traumatic. A CASA volunteer can become a stable, familiar adult presence in the middle of that uncertainty.
“The CASA is there to help stabilize some of that,” Goede said. “They’re there to give them that friendly face, that look that says, ‘I know this person and I know they’re going to listen to me.’”
Goede’s understanding of this work is also personal. Her youngest daughter adopted a child from an international orphanage in Ukraine, and Goede has seen how the absence of consistent adult connection can affect a child’s ability to trust, socialize, and feel secure.
That experience, combined with her years in education and ministry, has shaped the way she sees CASA’s mission.
For Goede, CASA is about more than court reports or board service. It is about reminding the children of Jefferson County that they still matter, their story matters, and someone is willing to show up for them.
Know someone who should be featured in Those Who Serve? Send their name, role, and a short note about their service to The Jefferson Review.
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Help provide trained advocates for children in foster care who need a voice, a steady presence, and someone willing to stand beside them.
Whether you give, volunteer, attend an informational meeting, or simply learn more, your support helps CASA continue serving children and families across Jefferson County.
Every child deserves to be heard. CASA volunteers help make that possible.
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