She leads with unwavering grace and constant focus on our purpose and calling,” says Lauren Geier, Arkansas State CASA director, in praise of Crystal Vickmark. “Under Crystal’s leadership, CASA of Northwest Arkansas has continued to grow, serving unbelievably high numbers of children in their region and consistently recruiting and training volunteer advocates of the highest quality.”
It was for her work as executive director of Court Appointed Special Advocates of Northwest Arkansas that Vickmark received the Kappa Alpha Theta Program Director of the Year Award from the National Court Appointed Special Advocate/Guardian Ad Litem Association for Children. The announcement was made at the organization’s virtual Awards of Excellence ceremony on Oct. 21. The award is named for the Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity, which has provided substantial monetary and volunteer support to National CASA/GAL and its network of programs for more than 30 years.
Vickmark is one of nearly 900 local CASA/GAL program directors in the United States.
“The Awards of Excellence honorees are selected from a nationwide pool of nominees and demonstrate incredible commitment to serving children and families through CASA/GAL programs,” says Tara Perry, CEO of the National CASA/GAL Association for Children. “I am inspired by their dedication to our mission and am grateful for the time and energy they devote to this important work.”
The mission of CASA, as Vickmark explains it, is to “recruit, train and supervise volunteer CASAs who provide one-on-one advocacy to abused and/ or neglected children in foster care.”
“CASA advocates provide critical, objective advocacy — from communicating with individuals on the child’s behalf (including judges, attorneys, caseworkers, educators, and foster parents) to submitting court reports detailing the case’s progress and making recommendations about the child’s placement and services,” Vick-mark explains. “CASAs advocate for a variety of services including counseling, speech, physical or occupational therapies, therapeutic foster care, medical and dental care — whatever it takes to make sure the emotional and physical needs of the child victim are being met. As foster children, on average, they will change homes three times while in the system. Our CASAs fight for stability whenever possible to reduce the trauma these children experience.”
When she joined CASA in Northwest Arkansas in 2003, Vickmark says, the program was only able to serve about a third of the children in foster care in four counties — and that was still considered a “fairly large” CASA program.
Now, she says, “CASA of Northwest Arkansas just finished our fiscal year on June 30 and are proud to say we were able to serve EVERY child in our four-county region: 968 children. We currently have just over 400 trained CASA volunteers and can boast that we have volunteers anxiously awaiting assignment to a child or family in foster care.”
Born in Iowa and raised in South Dakota, Vickmark knew even as a child herself that not all homes were happy.
“My mother grew up in a less than ideal situation,” she reveals. “Her mentally ill mother would leave her and her siblings to fend for themselves for weeks at a time. It was my mother’s experiences that led to me to take psychology classes in both high school and college. I was always impressed with my mother’s resilience, compassion and strength.”
Vickmark’s identity was also forged by a car accident when she was 8 that resulted in two broken legs and a broken arm for her and total disability for her father.
“While I was only in the hospital for a few weeks after, that was the first of many, many hospitalizations,” she remembers. “By the time I was 12 years old, I knew that I was going to be an orthopaedic surgeon at a children’s hospital. I wanted to help children like me be heard and helped.
“I applied to and got into my dream school,” she says. But while she knew her parents “would have moved mountains” to help her, she decided to go to a more affordable state school. A professor fueled her passion for psychology, “and I knew my path was forever altered.”
Vickmark graduated with a degree in psychology and immediately went on to get a master’s in clinical counseling and human resource development. Along the way, she met Ryan Vickmark, the man who would become her husband.
“She made friends easily and seemed to get along well with just about everybody that she knew,” he said in a 2104 Profile interview with the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “One of the first things I noticed about her was how confident and outgoing she is. Meeting someone like that was a breath of fresh air.”
“My first job after school was working with youth and adults with disabilities,” Crystal Vickmark remembers. “A few years later, we moved to Iowa, and I started to work with families and children who were at high risk for entering the foster care system. It was there that I met and worked with my first CASA volunteer.”
Ryan’s job brought them to Northwest Arkansas, and soon Vickmark found the CASA program here. She worked as an assistant to the CASA director, became an advocate supervisor and had another quick step up the ladder when the executive director left unexpectedly, as reported in a Northwest Arkansas Profile story in 2014. Vickmark proved herself during her time as interim director, and has kept the position ever since.
“We had a great foundation at that time of both staff and volunteers,” she remembers of a time that seems “so long ago.” “Our funding stream was not diversified; we were very grant heavy, which is risky for any organization.
“Shortly after accepting the executive director position, I was inspired by a fundraiser that I saw back in South Dakota,” she recalls. “I brought the idea back to our board and staff. We took a leap of faith and scheduled our first annual Playhouse Palooza. It was a lot of work, but we learned a lot, and the next year it was even easier. Each year this event grew larger, which created more unrestricted funding, exposure in our community and more volunteers.”
“In the next five to 10 years, I see our program continuing to serve 100% of the children in the foster care system while concurrently working to strengthen our staff and volunteer base,” Vickmark says, looking forward. “Two years ago, our board president, Mike Schmandt, challenged us to think about what we were going to do when we met our 2020 goal of serving every child in the foster care system. We came up with a concurrent goal of ensuring that our volunteers, and staff, are highly trained so they can fiercely advocate for the children we serve.
“Last year, we started to heavily invest in training both our staff and our volunteers. Knowing we would not have enough space to provide the amount of continuing education we would like, we added a second training room that more than doubled our previous training space. We are anxious to start using this new space in the near future as we ensure the quality of our training and volunteers are the highest caliber.
Vickmark says she is shocked and humbled by the national award.
“I feel the award should be for the program, not the director. If it were not for the amazing team we have, I would not have received this award,” she says. “They are the ones that are recruiting and training volunteers. They are helping our volunteers with court reports and providing them guidance and support. They are behind the scenes of [the annual fundraiser] Light of Hope, making sure that every single detail is perfect, ensuring we have the funds to do this great work. I am honored to lead them every day.”
CASA
Light of Hope
What: A virtual fundraiser presented by General Mills to share “inspiring stories of the power of [CASA] advocacy.”
“The goals of this signature event are to spread the CASA message, recruit new volunteer advocates and raise funds for our life-changing advocacy,” organizers say. “In order for this virtual event to be successful, we need as many friends, both old and new, to watch. If you are willing to host a Facebook watch party or a peer-to-peer fundraiser on our behalf, please contact Colleen at [email protected].” When: 8 a.m. & noon Nov. 10 Where: Online Information: Email [email protected] or call (479) 725-2213
Becca Martin-Brown is Features editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @nwabecca.