We are CAN | Erica Wedberg
Some advocates come to this work through textbooks and training. Erica Wedberg came through life.
She was born in California, but her story really begins at 125th Street in New York City — the border of Harlem, where she moved at five years old after her parents divorced. Her school was 85% Black. Her best friends were, in her words, a rainbow. Her grandmother, who lived down the block, carried stories of life as a peasant in Hungary. Her mother believed in a gentler kind of parenting, one that didn't rely on hurt or shame to shape children's behavior. Erica absorbed all of it.
"I credit that experience with laying the groundwork for my acceptance of people who are different from me," she says. It's a foundation that has informed everything since.
After high school, life took her to Ann Arbor, then Denver, then Boulder for college, then back to Michigan — the kind of winding path that tends to shape a person. She built her career as an educator, spending years at Bangor Central teaching K-1, then Reading Recovery, then Interventions. Colleagues would have described her as organized, supportive, and a hard worker. She understood kids. She understood what it meant to reach a child who wasn't being reached.
Outside the classroom, she was living another education entirely. She became a foster parent, then an adoptive parent. She took in teenage foster girls. When she retired, she knew what she wanted to do next. She sought out CASA training, enrolled in the fall 2016 class, and got to work.
Ask Erica about her most meaningful moment as a CASA volunteer and she doesn't hesitate. She spent six years on a single case: six years of showing up, learning the system, and building her understanding of the law, the family, and the child at the center of it all. When the moment came, she was ready. In a courtroom exchange with the mother's attorney, she drew on her experience as an adoptive parent and her firsthand knowledge of Reactive Attachment Disorder to make the case for what this child needed. She won.
"Cases don't always go the way you want," she says. "You just have to move on." But this one did. It ended in adoption — exactly what she and the team believed was right.
Alongside her CASA work, Erica teaches GROW classes for foster parents, bringing everything she's learned in the classroom, the courtroom, and her own home to the people just beginning that journey. She has stayed connected with families long after cases closed. She is, by every measure, the kind of volunteer who doesn't leave.
“I like having a home for my work and myself," Erica says of what CAN Council means to her. For someone who has spent a lifetime absorbing the world and turning it into something useful for others, she has earned every bit of it.