Animal Welfare Professionals

Do you work with local colleges, businesses, school groups, etc.?

We do utilize a 2 college groups, and a few other groups who volunteer to  help with our events and general shelter maintenance or landscape clean up, but not handling or socializing our animals. It would be nice to have entire groups in our K9 programs but so far, there's a time commitment we haven't been able to overcome. 

We have recently partnered with our local high school's "Helping Paws" Club. Our first event was a PETmas PAWty in coordination with Petco's Photos with Santa. The kids put together games & activities for people & pets, local businesses donated gift certificates for raffles and/or set up a holiday shopping booth. Our tagline is "compassion, cooperation, commUNITY!" so this was a perfect way to illustrate that. The kids had a lot of learning opportunities -- animal welfare, logistics, advertising & marketing, resource management, fundraising -- creating the next generation of animal welfare leaders! 

As an extension to my previous comment, I hope to expand the kids' learning by giving them options as to how they use the money we raise...give them an opportunity to see how shelters & rescues must be fiscally responsible & transparent and make difficult choices. I will be interested to see if they decide to sponsor one animal's medical needs, one shelter's wish list items, a spay/neuter clinic day or similar or if they surprise me and come up with an amazing idea of their own!