Standards & Quality Assurance

The goal of our local and state standards is to establish requirements that we believe will assure quality while allowing individual organizations room for creativity and innovation. Administrative and program staff must weigh how to create efficiencies and effectiveness to arrive at the highest quality advocacy on behalf of the children they serve, related to their models, governing structure and legislated constraints. It is expected that programs make decisions related to best practices with continual reflection and evaluation of outcomes for children.

A set of quality standards to measure a program’s operations demonstrate that an organization:

Respects and protects the children it serves
Utilizes established policies and procedures necessary for effective management
Manages its financial affairs prudently and is committed to the principles of public disclosure
Continually evaluates its services and operations

Our standards provide a framework for quality program management. They define the most effective overall approach to manage a particular aspect of program operation as well as requirements to operationalize the overall standard by specifying the practices that carry out the intent.

A primary goal and guiding principle of the quality assurance system is to strengthen organizations and ultimately support their efforts to provide high quality child advocacy and achieve the maximum level of excellence. The National CASA Self-Assessment tools, one for state organizations and another for local programs, are used to measure compliance with standards. Each state organization and local program participates in the self-assessment process once every four years.