Jordan Trezona has always been altruistic. He is a premed student at UC Davis and works at Children’s Hospital of Oakland as an orthopedic technician. When Jordan transferred to UC Davis for college, he immediately started looking for volunteer opportunities.
“The campus hosted a volunteer fair and Yolo County CASA was the last booth I stopped by. I talked to Ben Cadranel and Nancy Pacheco about their experiences volunteering for the organization and it seemed like a really positive and valuable way to spend my time.”
Jordan has had his CASA child assigned to him for a little over a year and he likes to give him experiences that most kids already have. “I just like to set a good example for him, play sports with him, take him to try new foods and have new experiences. Foster parents, social workers, and other professionals have big case loads and sometimes ‘just being a kid’ slips through the cracks. CASA volunteers can help facilitate experiences for foster children that most children in a stable home take for granted.”
Going to court was also an eye opening experience for Jordan. “Advocacy was new to me and I had never been to court before. I quickly realized how important it is to have someone speak up for children who need it. The judge takes CASA volunteers very seriously.”
As a busy premed student and working professional, Jordan says the time commitment can be intense, but it is the calling that keeps him going. “Things haven’t come easily to me in life. For example, I’ve always had to work full-time to afford college. I’ll never forget when a coworker gave me a bike to help me get around the UC Davis campus when I couldn’t afford one. To him it wasn’t much, but made my life so much easier. I hope to be that for my CASA child. We all need help every once in a while and I want to help my CASA child realize that he is important and deserves his own time and special experiences with someone.”
Jordan’s hard work certainly isn’t lost on his CASA child, “Sometimes he says he can’t believe that I don’t just stop coming to see him, considering how busy I am. I want him to have different expectations of the world and through my actions, I hope to achieve that. Things are going really well in his life right now. I have high hopes for the future and I am honored I could step in during a really hard time for him.”
