How Dave Johnson came full circle with CASA of the Pikes Peak Region

It was the mid-90s when Dave Johnson changed his opinion of CASA.

Having been a family law attorney for decades, Johnson was serving as a guardian ad litem (GAL) within the juvenile court system in 1989 when the Junior League of Colorado Springs began implementing a CASA program for EL Paso County.

It had been 1977 when CASA was born nationally (in Seattle), but it didn’t matter to Johnson that a judge had come up with the idea.

“I was thinking these are going to be non-lawyers who are going to come in and meet the child, meet the parents, and then file some kind of report with the court,” he recalls. “And I thought these are lay people and what can they possibly bring to the table? I was kind of looking down my nose and saying we don’t need this.”

The bench implemented CASA of the Pikes Peak Region anyhow. It was 1989 and Trudy Strewler-Hodges was the first executive director. Johnson soon found CASA assigned to his GAL cases before he became a Magistrate.

“As a magistrate, I had cases where CASAs were on board and I was persuaded very quickly and very completely that they brought a lot to the table and that often times CASAs were the ONLY people in the courtroom who really knew what was going on in the case. They were certainly more informed about the child than anybody else.”

Since CASA’s inception in the 4^th Judicial District in 1989, the program has expanded from El Paso County into Teller County. Advocates have spoken up for over 25,000 vulnerable children in both the Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek courthouses.

And Johnson has been a passionate and dedicated supporter for at least 30 of those 34 years.

“I was wrong and I’m happy to admit it,” he says.

By the mid-90’s, he was providing the legal training for new advocates in the old Hewlett Packard Building where CASA trainings used to take place. He told the trainees about the about the legal process, the juvenile court system, what the courtroom was like, the children’s code, and the types of things they would be asked to do.

In 2000-2003,  Dave co-chaired CASA of the Pikes Peak Region’s first capital campaign when the nonprofit moved out of the courthouse and into its first building on Cascade Ave. He then sat on the CASA of the Pikes Peak Region board of directors from 2013-2019 (chair in 2018) and chaired the group’s second capital campaign which resulted in the purchase of the modern-day headquarters at 418 S. Weber Street.

Johnson has been financially supporting CASA here in the Pikes Peak Region for at least the past 20 years, and his firm – Johnson Kush, P.C. – was one of the very first business partners when the nonprofit launched it Business Partner Program in 2019.

Dave Johnson is the kind of guy who will never stop supporting something he believes in. When he retires, his plans include more flyfishing, more trips to the nation’s baseball parks with his Virginia-based daughter, and of course volunteering in CASA’s Supervised Exchange & Parenting Time (SEPT) program.