Florida Guardian ad Litem Academy

CAM-centric diversity training allows us to dive deeper into a CAM’s management of volunteers, i.e., focus on the influence of the volunteer’s culture, personality, belief/value systems, and how they advocate for children.  For instance, a volunteer’s position on gay marriage (for or against) may have a direct impact on how they would advocate for an LGBTQ youth.  CAM’s understanding of this and ability to strategize on how to best engage and guide this type of volunteer mindset is crucial.  Diversity training for this purpose can provide the necessary tools to assist with this issue.

Tailor-made diversity training is valuable for CAMs because it teaches staff to look “inward” and gain some awareness of how their own bias may impact how they manage different volunteer personalities, perspectives and even how they advocate for children.  This will also better prepare CAMs to work with a plethora of different personalities, backgrounds and opinions, which may be new to them, i.e., new college graduate with little child welfare or even life experience.  

For those with the Guardian ad Litem Program, this 1 hour course does apply towards in-service hours. Please select training topic "Staff Development" and specify the title of the course "CAM Diversity Training" and a summary of the topic when inputting into Optima.