Off The Bench: Supporting Nonprofits by Steve Rideout

In a prior article about Drug Courts, I stated that “without the timely cooperation and collaboration of service providers whether they are governmental, private, or nonprofit, there are potential and substantial financial consequences to a state.”

Without that cooperation and collaboration, there are also consequences for the courts, the people who appear before them, and other people, including children, who are the subjects of litigation. Those involved in those court cases are impacted by the ability of courts to run efficiently, to be effective, and to make their decisions on the best available evidence.

On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there are hundreds if not thousands of nonprofits many of which engage in human services such as mental health, feeding adults and children, housing, providing clothing such as warm coats in the winter, and the list goes on. There also those nonprofits that do great work in so many other areas such as our environment, arts, animals, historical preservation, and that list goes on. All of them need our support.

It is in the human services area, especially with regard to child and family issues where the courts are involved, where there is a particular need for funding that is too often not met. While nonprofits serving people in this arena will not necessarily go out of business if their funding is inadequate, they will not be able to provide the services that are needed in a community and, in many cases, by the court as it makes its decision in that difficult case.

These services are not only needed to help with cases in court. They are needed to help keep cases out of court or reduce court matters from becoming more complicated and thus needing more judicial time for hearing and decision-making.

Some examples come from organizations where I am a board member or volunteer. The Mid Shore Community Mediation Center (MSCMC) provides services for the Dorchester County Public Schools for mediating disputes in some of the county schools. The school system pays for those services, but the need, especially now, is greater than it has ever been. MSCMC also provides mediation services for the courts in custody cases. So there is a need not only for volunteer mediators who need to be trained, there is a need for more staff to help with the caseload that exists. When they are successful in having the students solve a dispute between themselves, that avoids a potential delinquency case coming to court if those two students or group of students had been in one or more fights. If MSCMC helps parents to resolve a custody dispute, that avoids a contested custody case in court that can cost thousands of dollars for lawyers or have parents trying to present their case without help.

The Court Appointed Advocates of the Mid Shore (CASA) advocates for children involved in the child welfare system. It also provides volunteers for the Dorchester truancy court project that can only take 40-45 children. I have been advised that the number of children eligible for that project is much greater than the capacity of the court to hear them all. There is a need for volunteers to be trained for the work of CASA but also the need for funding to provide sufficient staff to train and safely monitor the work of the volunteers.

While much of the funding for these and other nonprofits come from grants, those grants often have restrictions or requirements that limit how the money can be used. Without funding from the community or from grants such as those provided by the Mid Shore Community Foundation, nonprofits are not able to provide all of the services needed in the most efficient and effective way.

From the court perspective hearing custody cases is not easy. In most cases they take lots of time. Judges have to make complex decisions when often the parents are not represented by a lawyer, don’t know how to present their evidence, and are angry with whatever decision the judge makes. During my time on the bench, I wound up typing my own orders because the parents often were so angry with one another my custody and visitation orders had to be very tight and clear about times for pick up and return, locations for the transfer, separation distances between parents, etc. That was intended to prevent them from having to come back to court. I had one father so angry with a decision that he went from the courtroom to the clerk’s office to file a new motion for a hearing to change the decision that I had just made.

As part of the hearing process, I found it important to make sure that both parties and their witnesses and supporters understood what I had heard and what the legal requirement was for making my determination. One parent only had to “win” by 51%. I always encouraged settlement or mediation as the results were always better than my decisions, and the time that it took me to wade through what “he said” and “she said” was significant after which in the Virginia system either parent had the right to appeal to our Circuit Court for a brand-new trial.

With our truancy caseload, after years of few cases each year, a new superintendent and I agreed to a process that brought three hundred and then four hundred cases a year to our court. I was told that there could have been 700-800 but that the school system and our court intake process did not have enough staff to manage the caseload. If that caseload is not in court, it is somewhere being overseen by someone in another system who is overwhelmed with what has been given to him or her to address.

For the betterment of all of our communities, it is critical to find those nonprofits that are doing good work and to support them and to volunteer in the work they are doing. If you do not know who is doing what in your community, ask a friend, a neighbor, someone you know and trust. As part of your consideration on where your money or time might go, think about the programs run in the minority communities by African Americans and Latinos. They will be known and trusted in their communities and from my observations are not being supported enough by the larger communities in which they provide their services.

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can reached at [email protected]