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About the Maine Guardian ad Litem Institute

Mission Statement

The Mission of the Maine Guardian Ad Litem Institute is to improve the welfare of Maine's children through strengthening the institution of the Guardian Ad Litem by advocating for improved standards of practice, education, and compensation for those individuals serving as Guardian Ad Litem and providing mutual support and assistance on issues relating to the work of Guardians Ad Litem.

Mentoring

Guardian work is, by its very nature, isolating. It is also work that depends, to some degree, on experience. Every Guardian runs into cases that are particularly difficult to work with or to decide. To decrease the isolation of Guardians in performing their duties, we have developed a mentoring program in which we try to match experienced guardians with those who would like to have a mentoring relationship. Some of these relationships are informal, on an "as needed" basis. Some are more formal, shadowing an experienced Guardian in a case or consulting frequently with an experienced Guardian on one of your cases. If you are interested in being a mentor, or would like mentoring, please contact Abbie Teachout at: abbie.teachout@verizon.net. Once you have a mentor, the extent of the relationship will be between the two of you.

Legislative Advocacy

We are interested in furthering our profession and making it easier to do our work. In the 2005 legislative session we proposed legislation that would: (1) Standardize our work in every court in which we practice, including the probate court, using the "best interests of the child" standard; (2) Give GALs who practice in Probate Court the same quasi-judicial immunity that Guardians receive in District Court; and (3) Exempt GALs from state charges for obtaining criminal and driving records from state agencies. The first two items were passed into legislation but the third ran into a roadblock at the Judiciary Committee and will have to be renewed in order to pass into legislation.

We also have another project we have been working on, which is creating a legislative definition and support for the position of "parenting coordinator", providing definitional language, scope of powers, judicial immunity, and compensation for this position. This position provides an "out of court" solution for those high-conflict families who continue to argue over the meaning of and the peripheries of child custody orders and who otherwise would return to court frequently. It provides a decision-making process for disputes not worthy of full-blown litigation in the Court System.

A third project seeks to enable mental health-guardians (those who are guardians by virtue of their mental health profession licensure) to be appointed to Title 22 cases. At present federal law which provides funding to states for child protection court activities provides that states must provide a GAL in every case who is either an attorney or a CASA volunteer. Although mental health-GALs are fully rostered GALs, and sometimes former DHHS case workers, the courts are not authorized to appoint them in Title 22 child protection cases as a routine matter. We think this should change.

If you are interested in working on legislative advocacy (testifying, talking to legislators, drafting legislation, obtaining testimony, etc.), contact Toby Hollander at tholland@maine.rr.com.

List Serve

The Maine GAL Institute operates a "list serve" in which members can post an email that is delivered to every other member who has an email address. This is one of the ways in which we share expertise and information and alert each other to resources or upcoming events. In the future, we are working to make this service archivable and searchable so past advice and/or resources are available to members no matter when they log on. We are seeking to make these emails available either as a digest or by direct delivery or through logging on to the Internet. Access to this list serve is restricted to dues paying members of the GAL Institute.

Dues

Our dues are presently set at $30.00 per year, due at the annual meeting every Spring.


Meeting Minutes

We will post our future meeting minutes in this space.