TOWNSHIP OF WASHINGTON, N.J.—Nilene Evans was newly retired in spring 2016 and looking for a way to put her skills and experience back to work.
Then she saw Charles “Chip” Giamo in the newspaper.
A May 16, 2016, profile in The Record featured Giamo, a longtime volunteer with Bergen County Court Appointed Special Advocates, explaining what it meant to be the one person assigned specifically to look out for a child’s best interests while that child moved through the foster-care system.
Children might change therapists, schools, foster homes, caseworkers and attorneys, Giamo told the newspaper.
“There’s only one person that constantly moves with them — the CASA volunteer.”
For Evans, a Township of Washington resident and retired corporate securities lawyer, the story landed at exactly the right moment.
The story, she said, “just clicked for me.” She saw in Giamo a model for how she might spend the next chapter of her own life.
“He was passionate about ‘his kids,’ and I realized that he was a role model for how I should devote my time and skills.”
Evans became a Bergen CASA Advocate herself. In time, the man whose newspaper profile had inspired her became a colleague and friend.
Giamo, 81, of Hasbrouck Heights, died unexpectedly July 25. A U.S. Army veteran, retired accountant, husband of 58 years, father and grandfather, he had devoted 19 years to advocating for children in foster care through Bergen CASA.
His loss has been deeply felt inside the organization. It also comes at a critical moment: Bergen CASA says the number of children it serves is climbing even as it faces a significant loss of federal funding and a pressing need for additional volunteer Advocates.
Now Evans and Bergen CASA are hoping Giamo’s example might work once more.
One newspaper story about Chip Giamo brought Evans to CASA 10 years ago.
Perhaps another will lead someone else there today.
‘Maybe I could make a small difference’
Giamo did not come to CASA from social work, education or law.
He had worked as an accountant for M&M Mars and volunteered with Make-A-Wish. But CASA offered a different challenge — one that required him to work with caseworkers, therapists, psychiatrists, foster parents, biological parents and others involved in a child’s life.
The work could be complicated. His reason for doing it was not.
“I was drawn to it because I thought, corny as it sounds, that maybe I could make a small difference to one of these kids, somewhere down the line,” Giamo told The Record in 2016.
His primary responsibility, he said, was making sure a child did not “fall through the cracks.”
In one case he described at the time, Giamo questioned whether a child belonged in a school program for emotionally disturbed students. He advocated for a different placement, and the child ultimately entered a life-skills program, moved on to high school, was doing well and had been adopted.
But before an Advocate could accomplish much, Giamo understood, a child first had to learn to trust the unfamiliar adult who had entered an already unsettled life.
“You chit-chat, you make jokes, you build up a bit of a relationship,” he said. “It takes time.”
Time — and constancy — would become hallmarks of Giamo’s work.
Bergen CASA Executive Director Lucy Rosen tells us that in one of his later cases, Giamo began advocating for a child at age 8 in 2016.
Over the years that followed, Rosen said, the young person experienced 21 placements.
Giamo remained.
The young person is now 18 and doing well, Rosen said. Recently, the formal CASA relationship ended so that Giamo could remain in his life simply as a friend.
He attended Giamo’s funeral.
The story gives particular weight to something Giamo had told The Record a decade earlier: while almost everyone else in a foster child’s life may change, the CASA Advocate can be the one person who keeps showing up.
Advocacy built on trust
Evans remembers Giamo not simply for how long he served but for the way he worked. “He was always smiling and willing to share his knowledge of the best ways to help our kids,” she said. “I sat with him in court and laughed with him at CASA events. He never gave up on the children for whom he advocated.”
At Giamo’s wake, Evans spoke with the youth for whom he had once served as a CASA Advocate for all those years. The young man had been adopted but remained close to him.
“The youth was clearly heartbroken,” Evans said. “Chip was the person who had been in his life the longest. It was as if he had lost his grandfather. That is the kind of love and loyalty that Chip inspired.”
Rosen, who started at Bergen CASA as an Advocate herself, remembers being struck by Giamo’s ease with people from the first time she met him.
“He was so genuinely down to earth and charming, so comfortable with everyone he met, that I wondered how I could ever measure up as a CASA Advocate,” she wrote in a remembrance posted after his death. “People immediately trusted him. They relaxed around him.”
Years later, when Rosen was conducting Bergen CASA’s pre-service training, she made Giamo what she called her “secret weapon”: She scheduled him toward the end of the training, after new Advocates had spent weeks learning how to perform the role “by the book.”
Then Giamo would explain what experience had taught him:
Know the case before meeting the caseworker. Read every document. Arrive with thoughtful questions. Make clear from the beginning that you want to become a useful part of the team rather than another demand on an already overburdened professional.
And always cap the conversation with a caseworker with a simple question: How can I help you?
“Chip understood something that can’t be taught from a manual: the strongest advocacy is built on trust,” Rosen wrote.
Because Giamo treated people with kindness and respect, she said, professionals returned his calls and emails and shared information with him. On particularly difficult cases, Rosen said, judges sometimes invited him into chambers with attorneys because they valued his judgment and understanding of the child-welfare system.
“When Bergen CASA had an especially difficult case, we quietly hoped Chip would take it,” Rosen said.
Giamo served further still: He had recently joined Bergen CASA’s Board of Trustees.
And there was another side of him that colleagues remember just as clearly: He checked in on the office. He brought cookies. Once he discovered Rosen’s favorites, she said, he would quietly bring extras for her in a paper bag.
If she was working late over a holiday weekend, he would call the office with a firm redirect: Go home.
“Family was everything to Chip,” Rosen wrote. “Relationships were everything to him.”
More children need Advocates
Giamo’s death comes as Bergen CASA says demand for its services is rising.
Rosen said the organization advocated for 152 children in the most recent fiscal year, up from 120 previously, and the number continues to increase.
At the same time, she said, Bergen CASA expects to lose approximately $200,000 in federal funding — more than half of its government grant support.
The organization recently arranged expedited summer training for five new volunteers to help support more than 10 newly placed foster children and is intensifying recruitment for its next Advocate training cohort, which begins Sept. 29.
Court Appointed Special Advocates are trained volunteers appointed by Family Court judges to advocate for the best interests of children who have entered foster care.
They work alongside — but independently of — caseworkers, attorneys, schools, medical and mental-health providers, foster families and biological families. Advocates gather information, identify unmet needs and report to the court so judges have an independent view of what is happening in a child’s life.
The work can involve education, medical care, mental-health services, transportation, family relationships and the innumerable practical problems that can arise when a child is living within a complex system.
It is not casual volunteerism.
Evans told Pascack Press earlier this year that when she signed up, she was advised to think of CASA almost as a part-time job.
That was precisely the sort of involvement she had wanted.
“I could still just write checks,” Evans said. “But I didn’t want to write checks. I wanted to do, and be involved.”
Much of the job, she said, is persistence: finding out what a child needs, locating the person who can provide it and following up until something happens.
“We nag,” Evans said. “We nag politely, and we work the system.”
Volunteers come with different professional backgrounds and different strengths, she said. The common denominator is simpler.
“It’s caring. You want to make a difference in a child’s life.”
Giamo’s widow, Margo, supports Bergen CASA telling his story to help recruit new Advocates, Rosen said, believing it is something her husband would have wanted.
The organization is also exploring creation of a scholarship in his honor for young people pursuing trade school, vocational education, professional certifications and other career pathways.
Rosen said the concept reflects Giamo’s practical understanding that a traditional four-year college degree is not the only path toward a secure and independent adulthood.
But another part of his legacy is already evident.
Nilene Evans is part of it.
Ten years ago, she opened a newspaper and encountered a retired man who believed that perhaps he could make a small difference for a child.
She read his story.
Then—naturally—she acted on it.
“Chip taught us that the heart of advocacy is showing up, earning trust, treating everyone with dignity, and never losing sight of the child,” Rosen wrote.
That was the example Evans saw in him in 2016.
Bergen CASA tells us it’s hoping someone reading about him today will see it, too.
Prospective volunteers can learn more about Bergen Couny CASA, upcoming information sessions, and Advocate training at bergencasa.org.