Jessica (McBee) Kerrigan, CASA Staff and Volunteer

 

92-170 Jessica Kerrigan

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Jessica Kerrigan

 

Will Bachman  00:00

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report ,conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Jessica Kerrigan, who many of us knew as Jessica McBee in college, Jessica. Welcome to the show.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  00:23

Thank you for having me, Will

 

Will Bachman  00:25

the Jessica tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  00:31

Okay, when right before graduation I had applied for an internship with the American Symphony Orchestra League, I was president of Mozart Society Orchestra, and I got to the finals, and I think I was first or maybe even second alternate, and this was kind of the first year in that fellowship they told me that they didn’t also make offers to the alternates, so my big plan for doing an orchestra management fellowship after graduation fell apart a little bit, and I had been interning with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony a little bit, and they made me a nice offer, and I floated it by my parents, and they were like, why would you do that, and I ended up coming home, and then three months later moved to Iowa City, where my boyfriend from class of 91 Wade Kerrigan, was in law school, so that put me in Iowa City, which a few of you may know, is home to American College Testing, and my first job there was working at American College Testing, wearing a headset, answering phones for med students who were calling, or sometimes their parents were calling to have their MCAT scores sent to different schools, so that’s what I did for American College Testing. Got engaged, we got married, I went back to a different role at American College Testing. Then after Wade graduated from law school, we moved to Kansas City. Kansas City is kind of the midpoint between our two homes. He’s from Iowa, I’m from Oklahoma. It puts us three hours from Iowa, five hours from my hometown. So that was a nice compromise, and we’ve been here ever since. And then in, we moved here in 94 and in December of 94 I got a job with Andrews McNeil Publishing. You may know them as the publisher of the cartoons, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, the many, many page day calendars and gift books, and I was their contract administrator, which was a quasi paralegal position, and I think because I had worked at the Kennedy School processing contract contracts or processing grant applications for the innovations in state and local government program, and because I had process scholarship applications at American College Testing, I think that put me contract adjacent enough to land this position at Andrews McNeil Publishing, so I was negotiating with authors or agents or reviewing licensing agreements. It was a fun place to work, a lot of creative people there, and I did that until my kids were born, I went part-time after my first daughter was born in 97 and then I quit in 2001 and just did some freelance work for them, compiled some page a day calendars for, oh, I think nurses page a day and the Dalai Lama page a day calendar, and then went back off and on with them to train a replacement, and finally they got somebody who’s stuck, and so I was out of the publishing game for a while, and home with my girls when they were small, and then did a little bit of knitting, worked part time at a knitting store, and did their social media, and was talking with a friend of mine from the Harvard Club, who had, was also a knitter, and had seen their social media, and she was saying how she was looking. For someone to do social media for the nonprofit she worked for, and I said I’m looking to get into full-time work again. My, my youngest is in school full time, so that’s how I started working for Jackson County CASA, and CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates, and I’ve been here for 12 years now,

 

Will Bachman  05:25

and what are you doing at the Jackson County Casa?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  05:29

Well, I started part-time in HR and social media marketing, and then switched over to full-time social media marketing for them, and then most recently have had a switch, we’ve outsourced our social media marketing, and I’m doing fund development work, so I’m in the fundraising department.

 

Will Bachman  05:52

And tell us a little bit about what is court-appointed special advocates. Is this a nonprofit or something that is funded by the county, or tell us a little bit about

 

Jessica Kerrigan  06:05

1. So, Casa Court-Appointed Special Advocates is a national organization. There are CASA organizations, and in almost all 50 states, and in lots of different court jurisdictions, we are appointed by the court to represent children who are in foster care due to parental abuse or neglect, and in those cases the parents have an attorney, the state has an attorney, the CASA representative is the sole person there to advocate for the child and what the child’s best interests are, so that’s what we do,

 

Will Bachman  06:54

and Who funds the court-appointed special advocate?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  07:00

We’re a nonprofit of 501 c3 so we receive lots of different grant funding, Victims of Crime Act fund, also known as VOCA funding. We receive some funding from the state of Missouri, we receive funding from our county, Kansas City is in Jackson County, and then we received lots of individual and corporate donations, and we have three major fundraisers during the year.

 

Will Bachman  07:30

Oh, okay. And you, so you, and you have attorneys that you, attorneys, I imagine that you, that you, that you pay.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  07:39

So our CASA agency is a little bit different than most in that we do employ attorneys on staff who are the official guardian ad litems for the children, the official guardians ad litem for the children, and then we train volunteers who are the ones who visit the children at least once a month in their foster placement, and determine what the child needs. What’s really going on with the child to kind of get a full picture of what does this child want, what would be best for them, have they had the right medical checks, are they getting the therapy they need? The CASA volunteer reports these things back to the attorney, and then the attorney can make the recommendations to the court. That’s in our jurisdiction. In other jurisdictions, the CASA advocate themselves is making the recommendations to the court.

 

Will Bachman  08:44

How does the point of view of the state differ from the of the child?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  08:52

Well, state children’s divisions and social services departments are very overworked and very overrun, so it’s not that their point of view is necessarily different, it’s just they don’t have the people resources that we do to send out kids to visit every every child frequently, and and make that their focus.

 

Will Bachman  09:22

Okay, so like,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  09:24

really, really get to know and develop a special friendship relationship with the child, be their trusted advocate. And I think most people who work in social services know turnover rate is very high. An average case for a child is going to be about 1836 months, and in that time they can have multiple caseworkers. Our idea is that the CASA volunteer – they’re only focusing on one child or one sibling group – they’re going to stay for the duration of the time that the child is in care. So that person, even though caseworkers may come and go, the CASA advocate is the consistent, trusted adult who knows the child really well and can make recommendations,

 

Will Bachman  10:16

so with these three different attorneys, in the parent’s attorney and the the child’s advocate and the state would they be cases where like the state’s attorney and the child’s advocate are like recommending different things to the to the judge like when when would there be daylight between between their recommendations

 

Jessica Kerrigan  10:39

so there might be recommendations in determining there might be differences of opinion in when a child is ready to when a parent is ready to reunify with a child, for example, if a parent has completed a substance use treatment program, and is working towards reunifying with their child, which we want all parents to be able to do. There may be some daylight between the state having an interest in moving on to the next case and ending thing and reunifying, we might say early, and there might be reasons we would advocate for. We’ve seen this show before. Let’s let mom or dad get a little more stability under them before we completely terminate any kind of supervision.

 

Will Bachman  11:47

I see

 

Jessica Kerrigan  11:48

that’s not, that’s not always the case. That it, that would be one example.

 

Will Bachman  11:52

Tell us some success stories of how CASA advocates have have helped some of these kids with, you know, sanitized, obviously, but tell us a little bit about, you know, the impact that this program has for these kids.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  12:10

I’ve seen lots of success stories, and part of my job, when I was the social media person for the agency, was helping to tell those success stories of seeing seen kids who we had recently had a young woman who was in high school but not engaged in high school, and her CASA volunteer worked with her diligently, but the traditional high school setting wasn’t working for her, but she had found an online program, and the CASA advocate approached the team and the school and said, I think this would be really good for her, and they were able, she was able to help her and check in with her and make sure she was doing the online program, she was able to graduate through the online program and get her high school equivalency, and is now gone on to further education, which we really like to see.

 

 

Jessica Kerrigan  13:18

we’ve had kids who we had its graduation time, so the graduation stories are top in my mind. We’ve had kids who’ve had a casa volunteer, and they’ve maybe reunified with a parent, and then unfortunately the parent might suffer a setback, and the kids might come back into care. In one case, the kids came back this time, not to a foster placement, but to a grandmother, and that was a different situation. And the CASA volunteer was able to check in with the kids, and see that things were going really well. The oldest, in that case, was able to, with the support of the grandmother, and the Casa volunteer, was able to graduate from high school, and has gone on. And even though she’s no longer in care, the grandmother ended up adopting her. They’re still in touch with the CASA volunteer. It becomes someone who’s a long-term source of support.

 

Will Bachman  14:29

When you were running social media, what was the main objective? Was it to find more volunteers to be the research kind of point of contact people, or was it more about raising funding, or both, or other things?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  14:45

Primarily, volunteers. We have a high need for volunteers. When I started, our agency was serving about half the people, half of the kids in care in the county, and that was by design. There was another. Other agency through the court that was serving the other half in the last few years that agency has gone away and the court has asked us to take over all of the cases, so what was a perpetual need for volunteers previously is now an even more acute need for volunteers, the advantage of having volunteers is we have attorneys on staff. The attorneys are handling anywhere from 60 to 100 cases a piece. They cannot visit and get to know all of these kids well, but the volunteers can, and the volunteers can relay that information and appear in court with the attorneys.

 

Will Bachman  15:50

You probably tried a lot of different things. What did you find was most effective at getting people to raise their hand to be a volunteer?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  16:00

Always, when we were out in the community, when we could get publicity on television or radio, that helped. We’re out in the public a lot. We have a carnival for kids in the summer, we have a big breakfast in the spring, and then we have a cocktail party in the fall that helps attract volunteers, but really telling the stories about the graduations or the kids, the people who will tell their stories at our big fundraising breakfast that has made a lot of difference. We have a number of volunteers who themselves spent time in foster care, and so they feel like it’s important for them to be able to give back, because they know what it’s like, and they may or may not have had someone there for them, and so they want to be that person for a child who’s in care.

 

Will Bachman  17:01

What are the typical profiles of the people that are these advocates?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  17:06

Oh, I all walks of life, really. We just had a, an award banquet or award breakfast, and our volunteer, who received the award, was a Hallmark retiree, but we have young people, some who are just recently out of school. We’ve got some active moms who have kids of their own. You know, my kids are out of the house. I’m a volunteer. We have former professionals. We also have some attorneys themselves who volunteer, and they do both sides of the job. They will be the guardian ad litem in court, and they will be the volunteer. And then all of our volunteers are supported by kind of the third person in this team, of they have an advocate supervisor, and the advocate supervisor will be the one when you come in and say, ah, my kids really want to stay with Grandma, Grandma would love to have them, but she has a tiny house, she needs a bunk bed, and the advocate supervisor will say, oh, here’s a source we can get bunk beds from this source, or here’s who we need to call to make it possible for Grandma to be able to take the kids.

 

Speaker 1  18:27

Wow,

 

Will Bachman  18:32

how has your understanding of the world changed from the time before you were involved in working for this program,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  18:45

that’s a really good question, because I would say that that is probably what I’ve gained the most from Casa, a lot of different insight into what goes on with families, I you hear about abuse or neglect cases, and only the most sensational ones make the news, right, and they’re always horrific abuse. What is much more common, and what kids are usually removed for, our reasons have to do with poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, medical neglect, problems surrounding substance use or untreated mental illness. With the right help and support, the idea is for families to be able to overcome whatever the stress is that’s happening that’s causing the problem, and then be able to reunify, because every kid you know, except in the most horrific of cases, which are the minority, they want to be able to. Live with their family, that’s their family. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  20:07

Tell us about the time when you were being a mom full time.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  20:12

So, being a mom full time was terrific. I really enjoyed being able to do that. Um, I took on a lot of volunteer roles, was able to volunteer at the kids’ school, was able to do things like learn to knit, and taught, and I still teach sometimes knitting classes. I follow our classmate Franklin Habit,

 

Will Bachman  20:39

yeah,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  20:40

and so being able to have that time at home was a real luxury, and I really, I really appreciated that.

 

Will Bachman  20:52

Tell us a story from your time working at the knitting store, like any.. I don’t know, anything that kind of surprised you when you were there, or any kind of insane, intense knitters you came across, or any, any stories.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  21:06

Knitters are wonderful. I don’t have any insane or intense stories. It’s a pretty, you know, chill community, but I really found that I enjoyed teaching knitting classes. I think you know I’m certainly not the most proficient or fastest knitter, and I don’t have a particular area of expertise, but I think I am pretty good at explaining things to different kinds of learners and kind of imagining where their obstacle is to learning this and explaining it in a way that they can grasp the concept. I really discovered I just enjoyed teaching and helping people with their project. When you think about it, it’s, you know, working at a knitting store is lots of problem solving all day, it’s fun in that way.

 

Will Bachman  22:06

You may be the first guest on the show so far from Kansas City. Tell us a little bit about life in Kansas City.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  22:13

Kansas City is wonderful. I mean, we’ve stayed here for since 94 and and had opportunities to move, but had really had no other place that we wanted to go. It’s handy to both coasts, or I guess equally inconvenient from both coasts. You can drive in a day and ski the next morning if you want to, you can drive to Chicago in about eight or hours, or so, depending on how long you stop. It’s centrally located. It has a good sports team. We’re big fans of the Chiefs and the Royals in the, in the city. And then we’re gearing up for the World Cup right now.

 

Will Bachman  23:03

Someone’s going to visit Kansas City. What’s the number one under the radar restaurant that you recommend that we need

 

Jessica Kerrigan  23:13

to go to? Oh goodness, well, you know, most people should, should come and visit, visit the barbecue, come for the barbecue.

 

Will Bachman  23:23

What’s the best off the beaten path barbecue that you know is not necessarily in all the guidebooks, but is the local go-to for you?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  23:32

You know, we, we tend to go to a lot of different ones, you know. Gates, Gates is the favorite, is the famous one, do we like gates. We have that for a lot of family parties. I tend to like different ones for different things. Q 39 for the brisket, Joe’s Kansas City for the pulled pork gates or the burnt ends, you can’t go wrong.

 

Will Bachman  24:07

Okay, I love the specificity. Okay, burnt ends, okay. Go to Gates, you want full park.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  24:14

Yeah, you’ll find that a lot of people will say, well, what do you want? What are you looking for? And then they’ll still tell you,

 

Will Bachman  24:24

tell us about a habit that you have developed at some point intentionally that you intentionally picked up and developed that you has been a game changer for you or that you recommend to others.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  24:40

Well, I have started a few years ago. I started exercising through a program called the Bar Method.

 

Will Bachman  24:50

Okay,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  24:51

it’s Bar, as in like a ballet bar,

 

Will Bachman  24:53

yeah, B A R E,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  24:55

right? Yeah, Bar Method. So I do that. Probably three or four times a week, and it has helped with strength and back pain and mobility. I feel that that’s been very helpful. I meet up with my college roommates every so often we try to get together at least once a year and go hiking, and it was one of, one of these trips in, in 2019 that made me realize, oh, I need to start doing something, because we were on a mountain, and what happens is they say, oh, well, let’s, let’s do this little hike, or let’s go up this mountain, and I was there in the wrong shoes and in the wrong clothes, and without the hiking chops really to be able to do it, and then after that trip I vowed, well, next time I will be ready.

 

Will Bachman  26:02

Where do you go hiking with your college roommates?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  26:06

When we got together, we were in New England, the around in, I think, New Hampshire, around Mount Washington. We did not hike Mount Washington, but that was the area we were in the White Mountains, so we go Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, that type of area

 

Will Bachman  26:30

is something that you’ve been doing mostly every year since graduation, or

 

Jessica Kerrigan  26:34

no, no, we really, it was, we got, we started it in 2019 and then got pandemic delayed, and then have have tried to go back every every summer or so, just for a long weekend, and it’s not always hiking, sometimes mercifully it rains, and then we just have to sit inside. They’re the kind of people who say, let’s go walk by the lake, and the next thing you know, you’re on a five mile walk around the lake.

 

Will Bachman  27:02

What was the instigating factor in 2019 that led you to get back together again?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  27:08

I think our kids have gotten to an old enough age where they did not require such intense, immediate, all the time attention that we could get out, you know, for a long weekend and be fine.

 

Will Bachman  27:24

Oh, nice. Okay,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  27:26

that was.. I know that was true for me.

 

Will Bachman  27:30

So, you’d been staying in touch with him that whole time?

 

Will Bachman  27:32

Oh, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  27:33

just not getting together in person.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  27:34

We had been staying in touch, we just hadn’t been able to get together. We got together, you know, when the kids were little, and that was its own kind of adventure, and we kind of wanted to create that only this time without the kids.

 

Will Bachman  27:47

That’s awesome. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  27:56

Well, I should probably say introduction to Russian civilization, because that is where I met my husband.

 

Will Bachman  28:02

Okay,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  28:03

we met in the small section for that class, but they, the other one that resonates, because I don’t have much recollection of Russian sieve, like I said, not the husband, so that was, I was maybe a little distracted sophomore tutorial with in history and literature with Bob Lamb and Mark Dolan was really

 

Will Bachman  28:30

a very

 

Jessica Kerrigan  28:35

academic stretch for me. We spent one semester on Ulysses and one semester on Moby Dick and a lot of lot of papers on those books.

 

Will Bachman  28:50

What do you still recall from that, or what? How did those, how did that particular course that change you, or what did you learn from

 

Jessica Kerrigan  29:01

it? I think I learned the value of a deep dive, as opposed to a superficial dive in things. I mean, we have lots of superficial understandings of, we know a little bit about a lot of things, but this was an opportunity to really dig in, and our assignment for our final assignment for Ulysses was a 20 page paper on the last page of Ulysses Molly Bloom’s speech, and that was a real exercise. exercise to come up with 20 pages on just one page of text,

 

Will Bachman  29:49

and I guess you were a history lit major. Tell us about your cultural consumption habits since then. Are you. So, do you become.. did you continue to be a big fan of history and literature, or have your interests shifted?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  30:07

They have fallen off completely. I’m embarrassed to say. I do try to keep up with some different classmates writing. Taya Miles came to University of Missouri-Kansas City, and went to hear her lecture, and I have her book almost finished with that. It is been more of a reader of The New Yorker, just smaller, shorter pieces, just as it happens when you have small children, when they’re young, you get in the habit of not being able to finish anything, and so then they’re out of the house. Now there’s nothing preventing me from actually picking up long pieces of literature, and yet I haven’t.

 

Will Bachman  30:58

Okay, and just for fun, you could do a 20-page paper on online,

 

Jessica Kerrigan  31:03

just for fun.

 

Will Bachman  31:04

Yeah, Jessica, for listeners who want to reconnect with you, follow up, where is the best place for them to find you online?

 

Jessica Kerrigan  31:14

You can find me on LinkedIn under Jessica Kerrigan in Kansas City, who works for Jackson County CASA, and I would say, if you are looking for a meaningful volunteer opportunity, everyone could be a CASA volunteer. You don’t need any special background or training. That’s one of the things that all the CASA programs do really well, is they provide many hours of training before you start, and then continuing education once you’re, once you’re a sworn advocate.

 

Will Bachman  31:52

Amazing, Jessica. Thanks for what you do. It’s great speaking with you.

 

Jessica Kerrigan  31:57

Thank you. Will enjoyed

 

Jessica Kerrigan  31:58

1. Bye.