Volunteering is a great way to get involved in your community and help others. There are so many different ways to get involved depending on your interests. Being a full-time university student and part-time employee, I haven’t had a lot of time lately to volunteer. Luckily, my family loves animals, so my mom decided to volunteer at a local dog rescue group. I am able to learn about volunteering through her and can even be directly involved with volunteering during the times when I’m home. I talked to my mom about her experience with volunteering and decided to share some of the highs and lows when it comes to working with animal rescue groups. Fair warning, the experience isn’t all glamorous and filled with puppy kisses, but the good certainly outweighs the bad.
There are so many things to do once you get involved. At many rescue groups, you can help with a variety of tasks such as fostering puppies and dogs, as well as fundraising and helping transport the dogs to and from the vet clinic and their new homes. There are so many different things to do and the more help, the better! Fundraising is a huge part of many rescue groups and can be quite influential when it comes to how the rescue functions. A lot of rescue groups use fundraising to raise money for vet visits and vaccinations for the animals. Even if now isn’t the right time to get directly involved in a rescue group, donating is super beneficial and can help so many different animals more than you know.
Fostering is also something that you can do if you decide to volunteer. Fostering is where you take the animal into your care for a couple of days or weeks while the rescue looks for a home or until they are old enough to go to their forever home. My mom has mainly fostered puppies, but you could foster many different kinds of animals at many different ages. Fostering helps the animals feel loved and can also help them learn. Many animals will go into foster homes without a lot of knowledge of how to act or behave in a home environment. You get to teach them new things such as navigating a new home environment. Through fostering, you make a huge difference in an animal’s life and get to see them learn and grow. One of the downsides to fostering is that it can be tough to let your foster baby go once they find a home, but you can make such a difference in their life, which is so rewarding.
Another way of helping is through transporting animals to and from different places. Some animals that are travelling long distances may need to be transported in sections and you could help by taking them a little bit of the way. If animals need to go to and from the vet, you could also take them there and stay with them for a bit. This is also a huge aspect of volunteering and helps to keep the rescue from running! Transporting is great if you have a flexible schedule and just want to get out and see some animals every once in a while.
Volunteering at a rescue isn’t all glamorous, but it sure is important and super rewarding. After talking with my mom, she said that it can be really hard and mentally challenging every now and then for a whole variety of reasons. The animals you see may be mentally or physically sick depending on where they come from, and since it is a rescue group, there can be some pretty rough stories behind some of the animals’ origins. You need to have thick skin to be able to push all of that aside and just love the animal and care for it as best as you can while it’s in your care. Volunteering at a rescue can also be so rewarding, as you make a huge difference in an animal’s life and watch them as they grow and learn. Plus, if you volunteer mainly with dogs, free puppy cuddles are a huge pro.
Thank you to my mom, Annette Winter, for helping me with this article and for everything you do for so many animals. Thank you to my dad, Andrew Winter, for everything you do as well!