As a proud member of The Women’s Foundation’s board, I wanted to tell those of you who couldn’t make it last week to the site visit to CASA of Maryland what an inspirational morning it was.

Marjorie moderated a panel of Gustavo Torres, CASA’s dynamic Executive Director; Christy Swanson, CASA’s Director of Services; Herminia Servat, CASA Board Member and Iris Murillo, CASA volunteer and local business owner.

CASA sits in the middle of the most diverse, low-income immigrant community in the metro area.  Within a mile of its offices is the largest day labor site (a huge parking lot where recent immigrants stand, sometimes all day, waiting for work).

CASA serves tens of thousands of commmunity members each year focusing on job training and placement, fair treatment of both documented and undocumented workers, English programs, computer training and financial literacy programs. It also lobbies state, county and D.C. governments for legislation that will help the community it serves.

This is a growing, deeply effective organization, benefiting many women who arrive in this country without language, job or financial survival skills.  We had a wonderful discussion with questions and answers, a tour of the community and a completely delicious lunch catered by one of the women CASA has served.

We should be so proud for supporting this wonderful organization!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Blog, Washington, Our Foundation, Giving Back. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.