Public institutions do not usually get destroyed on purpose. They get destroyed when someone decides first and investigates second.
Minnesota almost lost its CASA volunteer Guardian ad Litem program that way. It did not. The story of why it did not is worth more than the story of how close it came.
Where bad things come from
A new management team took over Minnesota’s Guardian ad Litem program in 2021 with the decision to end the CASA volunteer program. The study to support this effort came after that decision, not before it.
You do not have to take anyone’s word for the sequence. The report says so itself. Its opening remarks on page 2 describe program leadership seeking to perform due diligence about whether to formally end the use of volunteers. Due diligence on a conclusion already reached is not a study. It is paperwork.
The report, dated 09/15/2023, was produced by consultants from Management Analysis and Development, the MAD unit inside Minnesota Management and Budget. CASA Minnesota had agreed to a cost-benefit analysis. What management commissioned instead was a biased cost-effectiveness analysis, and the switch was made over CASA Minnesota’s repeated, documented disapproval. Initially the CASAMN board was asked to provide insights into benefits of a trained volunteer community pool of committed CASAs, but the results never made it into the report.
That sounds like a technicality. It is the whole thing. A cost-benefit analysis asks what volunteers deliver and what they cost, and can conclude they are worth keeping. A cost-effectiveness analysis asks how efficiently a task gets performed. It cannot leave out the positives and ask whether the task is worth doing. Changing the question guaranteed the answer.
The bias ran through the content as well as the framing. Gerard Bodell, president of CASA Minnesota, documented in his rebuttal that the allegations against volunteers appeared to come from interviews with program management holding biases against volunteers. One characterized volunteers as wealthy do-gooders. The actual roster was foster parents, teachers, stay-at-home parents and retirees, most of them with advanced degrees.
Here is what makes the whole exercise remarkable. Even built that way, the report conceded that volunteers performed better than employees at visiting children, attending hearings, and turning in reports on time. Those are the core functions of the job.
So the report introduced a new measure. It counted something called case activities, which captures data entries on cases, and on that basis employees came out ahead seven to one. The program had been piloting a transition from paper notes to system notes during the study period, so employees and volunteers were not even using the same process at the same time. A metric invented for the study, measuring data entry, outweighed actually seeing the child.
By 2024 Minnesota had twelve volunteer guardians ad litem. The program once fielded roughly 350.
That is what a predetermined conclusion costs. Not a bad program. A good one.
This is not a Minnesota problem
Two years later the same pattern ran at the federal level. On 04/22/2025 the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly terminated three federal grants to the National CASA/GAL Association, including pass-through funding to state and local programs and the training and technical assistance the network depends on. Nobody in those programs was consulted.
On 08/06/2025, after National CASA appealed, the DOJ reversed itself and reinstated the awards, citing alignment with the Department’s priority of protecting American children.
A hundred days of disruption for every CASA program in the country, ended because people filed an appeal and would not go away.
Same shape, bigger scale. A decision made fast by people distant from the work, reversed only because someone who knew the work pushed back.
What dedicated people actually did
They took the report apart in public, in writing, with their names on it.
Bodell delivered his rebuttal to the Guardian ad Litem Board on 10/17/2023. Rich Gehrman, who has personally conducted and supervised cost-benefit analyses for government agencies, delivered a second. KARA published both in full, and published its own public comments as well.
What the three documents established:
The cost figure was wrong. The report put the cost at $2,680 per case. The only material incremental cost to the state of running the volunteer program is one supervisor, roughly $56,000 plus benefits, inside a program spending about $23 million a year. That works out to under $1,200 per case. The executive summary presented volunteer and employee cost per case as nearly the same, which is not what absolute cost shows.
And even the report’s own math overstated it. Gehrman found that the chart on page 42 applied the same supervisory cost per volunteer as per employee, though volunteers carry only two or three cases each. The report’s own figure put total volunteer program cost at 6 percent of a paid guardian, and Gehrman concluded that still overstated it, with the error carried forward into the cost-per-case page that followed.
The national picture was absent. More than 950 volunteer CASA organizations operate across 49 states and the District of Columbia, with over 98,000 screened and trained volunteer guardians. The volunteer model is the dominant national model, and hybrid models of employees and volunteers working together exist throughout the country. This was communicated to the consultant and omitted. Ending Minnesota’s program would have made this the only state in the nation to do so.
Tenure was omitted. The report identified years of service as the key indicator of doing the job well, then left volunteer tenure out, stating the data was unavailable. CASA Minnesota had it. In the Fourth District, average employee tenure ran about two years. Average volunteer tenure ran nearly nine.
Key voices were missing. Hennepin County Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Mark Kappelhoff had publicly described the Fourth District program as in crisis, citing a lack of substance in both oral and written communication from the current guardian pool. He told Bodell on 08/18 that he had not been interviewed.
The promised seat at the table never materialized. On 05/16/2023 the Guardian ad Litem Board was told by program management that Bodell would have a seat at the table and would be involved in analyzing results. The Board approved it. He received a kickoff meeting and one interview, then results. He was never given access to the work as it was built or allowed to ask questions along the way, which is why none of the corrections above could be made before publication.
And some of the data was simply not credible. The report stated that CASA GALs missed 83 percent of required child visits. Bodell called that inconceivable and asked that it either be investigated and corrected or excluded as bad data.
One more that deserves its own line. The report indicated volunteers could not recruit diverse personnel. CASA Minnesota had a backlog of over 200 applicants, 40 of whom self-disclosed as BIPOC, and had not been allowed to share its recruiting efforts.
None of this required a lawsuit or a campaign. It required people who knew the facts, wrote them down, signed them, and kept showing up for two years.
What that bought
That management team resigned. New leadership arrived. The State Guardian ad Litem Board directed the volunteer program to restart, and the 2025 legislative session approved funding for supervision and training.
Then came the hard part, because somebody has to actually rebuild a thing once permission exists.
Alex Miller, Chief Information Officer and Interim Program Administrator for the State Guardian ad Litem Program, testified to the House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee in February 2026. Three CASA volunteer supervisors hired. 52 active volunteers. 47 more in training. A target of 100.
From the low of twelve CASA volunteers at the time of management’s resignation. It’s notable that at that time paid and volunteer resignations were at an all-time high and over 150 Minnesota Child Protection Children were without a Guardian ad Litem because of this.
Miller also did the thing the original process never did. He told the committee plainly what the program still needs to sustain that growth: paid staff, supervisory capacity, training, and technology support. He described the problem accurately instead of producing the answer someone wanted to hear.
That is the difference between the two eras in one sentence. One team decided the answer and commissioned a study to carry it. The other states the problem and asks for what it takes to fix it.
Why this matters beyond one program
A guardian ad litem is often the only adult in a courtroom whose single job is the child’s best interest. Not the agency’s. Not the parent’s. Not the county’s. The child’s.
Senior Judge Lyonel Norris has said that surrounding children only with employees serves to effectively institutionalize them. He is right, and this country knows what institutionalizing children costs.
Two children a month die in Minnesota while in child protection, according to the state’s 2023 Child Fatalities from Maltreatment Report and the Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota’s recent investigations.
CASA Minnesota said throughout that it was not anti-employee. It went to the Capitol and supported the increased budget for more guardians and higher pay. The position was never employees versus volunteers. It was that children deserve both.
The lesson for every organization watching institutions change faster than they can respond: performing well does not protect you. Having good data does not protect you if nobody collects it, or if the people holding it are kept out of the room. What protects you is being present when the question is framed, and persistent enough to still be there when it is answered wrong.
Minnesota’s volunteer program is alive because a handful of people did exactly that.
Congratulations to Alex Miller and the State Guardian ad Litem Board on the rebuild. And thanks to Gerard Bodell, Rich Gehrman, and every volunteer who stayed through years when staying made no sense.
If you want to be one of them, CASA Minnesota holds monthly information sessions at casamn.org.
Mike Tikkanen served as a CASA Guardian ad Litem from 1996 to 2012 and is a founding member of the CASA Minnesota board.
KIDS AT RISK ACTION / KARA / INVISIBLE CHILDREN
