I like to volunteer at the Madera County (Animal) Shelter. But a lot of my friends can’t volunteer down there because it would break their hearts to get attached to the animals and not be able to save them all.

Fortunately… there are many jobs that they’ve identified that can be done from the comfort of your own home.

A few volunteers started putting pictures of our dogs on Petfinder.com several years ago. Because of their efforts several dogs were adopted through this adoption portal. Now our pets are featured on over 10 similar portals and nearly 80 percent of the dogs featured this way are adopted.

A person never has to set foot on shelter grounds in order to do this work. Anyone with Internet access can upload pictures and biographies of the dogs.

Lots of jobs are available for the stay-at-home volunteer.

For example, we need people to answer our phone lines and fold our newsletters before mailing. We need people to type up minutes of our volunteer meetings. We need assistant dog trainers to help with the free classes available to anyone fostering an animal.

We need people to pick up torn bags of dog food that are being donated, as well as the glass and aluminum that people donate to our Cans for Critters program.

Some of our volunteers hand out flyers and answer questions about spaying and neutering in public places like the swap meet, stores and coffee shops. Every dollar spend on spaying and neutering saves the county $18 in collecting, housing, feeding and adopting or euthanizing an animal. Friends of the Madera Animal Shelter offers a voucher program to help low-income families spay and neuter their pets, and all of this paperwork done on this program is done in the private homes of volunteers.

Want to help save 50 animals in one day without spending a penny? Help take 50 of our animals to the Super Adoption Day in May. Last year, we took about 60 dogs and adopted out about 50 in one day.

The best part of volunteering is discovering like-minded friends that love animals as much as you do. If you’re interested in any of these endeavors and want to learn more, you can call Friends of the Madera Animal Shelter…

Andrea Robinson,
Madera

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 2:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.