My experiences as a CASA volunteer, more than any other aspect of my life, have expanded and deepened my understanding of the community that surrounds me. In Charlottesville, I feel like I live in a bubble, the boundaries of which are demarcated by the invisible but powerful indicators, education and economics. Only my CASA work takes me beyond these transparent but remarkably resilient walls and allows me to connect with people I see every day but would otherwise never know.

The families in my CASA cases have included a policeman, a waitress, a plumber's assistant, a truck driver, a motel housekeeper and a woman who periodically lives in a homeless shelter. I know these people and their children - I have listened to their anger, I have asked them uncomfortable questions and I have wrestled with how best to improve and protect the lives of the children, sometimes in opposition to their parents' hopes and desires.

The connections I form to my CASA families are not personal friendships, but neither are they the least bit patronizing or artificial. These are professional relationships - I have the power over them of making a recommendation to the judge, and no one involved ever forgets that - but they are also, by necessity, direct, intense and brutally honest.

People in pain speak without much pretense, and your most authentic self answers them, in return. That's because there's no beating around the bush and no possibility for polite superficiality when advocating for the best interests of a child whose life has already become troubled within a family that is at some stage of crisis. There's nothing to do but look a parent or grandparent right in the eye and speak a reasoned but heartfelt truth when explaining your recommendation that they not regain custody of the child they desperately want to raise. The same mandate applies to telling a twelve-year-old boy that he cannot return from school to the house where he woke up that morning. The stakes are so high that it's impossible to be anything other than honest.

These families are not statistics to me; they are made up of the individuals I work my hardest to understand and to assess in all their uniqueness. In each of the five cases I have investigated over eight years, I have gained tremendous insight into the lives of the extended families I met. With that exposure and insight has come a more complex appreciation of what it means to have your life limited and distorted by generations of sexual and emotional abuse, little education, less money and next to no opportunity to turn it all around. I have rediscovered compassion on another level.

My CASA experience has changed my perspective on the world, my politics, the conversations I have with my children-and all I did was venture forth into what was always already there, right around me. I got involved in the lives of children who are suffering. Most importantly, I know that I have helped some of these children, and in doing so, I have become a vital part of the true, the whole community I live in. The personal rewards are profound.