Making sure the kids are OK
Retired S.F. doctor a ‘caring’ advocate for foster children
Tony Guiles has spent his life helping children. Not long after moving to Santa Fe following his retirement from decades of pediatric work, the doctor, now 87, became a volunteer advocate with CASA First Judicial District.
Often shortened to CASA First, the volunteer group of court-appointed special advocates, or CASAs, work with and support children who are in foster care in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos counties.
It was in this capacity that Guiles met John Salinas, one of many children with challenging lives who have been aided by CASA First. Guiles was Salinas’ volunteer advocate as he aged out of New Mexico’s foster care system, and the two remain close.
Now, Salinas is a grown man with a family of his own who says he wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for Guiles’ help.
“Tony made sure this kid was safe and believed in himself,” said Annie Rasquin, the executive director of CASA First, who nominated Guiles to be one of The New Mexican‘s 10 Who Made a Difference for 2023.
Guiles is not only a court advocate for foster kids but also has been a CASA First board member for the past 16 years, helping to oversee and lead the organization.
Winning a 10 Who Made a Difference award isn’t the first time he has been recognized for his work. He was one of the honorees at CASA’s 25th anniversary celebration at the governor’s mansion three years ago. The celebration also recognized Salinas and former state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Vigil, who had overseen Salinas’ case as a children’s court judge.
A program for the anniversary event said Guiles “has helped to shape, strengthen and promote CASA’s role in helping neglected and abused children.”
Guiles isn’t hungry for personal recognition. In an interview, he kept coming back to how CASA has helped thousands of vulnerable children in its 28 years of advocating for foster kids.
“I would hope that this recognition becomes more about CASA than it is about me,” he said.
This is a quality Guiles’ colleagues also notice.
“He’s so kind and caring to all of us and he’s incredibly modest,” Rasquin said. “He’s one of the most modest people I know.”
Rasquin wrote in her nomination letter Guiles is “unquestionably our most active board director,” supportive of the staff and volunteers and usually the first to arrive at events.
“He is deeply humble, and compassionate, and carries himself with an infectious charm and goodwill for all,” she wrote. “Tony is deeply committed to our work and unequivocal that abused and neglected children deserve a voice and protection.”
Guiles spent his earlier years in North Carolina and Oklahoma and his 30-year professional career as a pediatric anesthesiologist at a children’s hospital in San Diego. This is what inspired him to want to help abused children.
“I saw some really ugly stories of parental abuse,” he said.
Like many newcomers to Santa Fe, Guiles came first as a tourist and decided he wanted to stay.
“We had fallen in love with Santa Fe,” he said. “We visited the Ghost Ranch a lot because my brother was there helping to run the place.”
Guiles and his wife moved to Santa Fe about 25 years ago. He’s since settled in, making plenty of friends around the community.
“Ninety-nine percent of them are retired old geezers like me,” he said with a laugh.
One of those friends got Guiles involved in volunteering for CASA First, an organization Guiles said has helped thousands of children out of “scary, dangerous, unpleasant home situations.”
“The common part of the problem is drugs,” Guiles said. “Substance abuse is very common in the parents of these children.”
CASA volunteers monitor a child’s foster home situation and acts as a liaison between the child and their parents, foster parents, social workers, teachers, treatment specialists, judges and attorneys. They also work with parents who have lost custody of their children, encouraging them to seek treatment and services.
“The goal is to get the family back in a healthy place and get the child back home,” Guiles said.
In an email, Rasquin described CASAs as “a consistent adult who follows a child through foster care, no matter where they are placed, or what happens to them. CASAs’ foremost task is to determine if our children in foster care are in a safe placement and provide them with vital resources. Our advocates also become a stable trusting adult in the corner of children who too often have no one else.”
This is important, she wrote, since the other people in these children’s lives, such as lawyers and CYFD workers, “often change and serve dozens of people of time.”
Rasquin noted Guiles has helped the community in multiple other ways, such as serving as a former medical director at Las Clinicas del Norte and a board member at El Centro Community Health Clinic.
CASA’s work can be hard, she said, with a lot of traumatized children and “hard-core cases.” Having someone with Guiles’ skills and institutional knowledge is essential.
“Having people with great experiences who support us makes a big difference,” she said. “He was a pediatric anesthesiologist; he’s unflappable. He’s really, really solid.”