VolunteerVolunteer
Volunteers are the backbone of the HEART program. Everyone working with HEART is a volunteer- and we could always use more! Email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for an application!
There are many ways one can volunteer for our organization. Here are a few ideas:
Adoption events- hold dogs and tell people about them, their history, age, behavior, etc. Tell people about our cats and introduce them
Fostering- without foster parents there would be no rescue group! It takes a special person to accept an unknown dog or cat into their home, integrate it with their other pets and family, help socialize the animal, take it to adoption events and, ultimately, let it go to a new forever home. It is incredibly rewarding and mayl break your heart!
Photographer- we love having great photos of our pets because it honestly helps them get adopted. However, not all of our foster parents know how to take a great photo! If you've got experience and would like to help in this area, we'd love it! You'd need to take photos, most often at adoption events (there are areas around the location that might help you get a good photo). You'd also have to get the photo to our volunteer who updates the website.
Training- most of the dogs that come to HEART have had little or no obedience training. If you enjoy teaching dogs basic commands such as sit, down, and stay, we'd like to hear from you! If you like to go for walks and would like to help one of our dogs learn to walk on a leash, that would be great!
Socializing- some of the dogs that enter our program can barely look at a person, let alone come to them or accept treats from them. These very special dogs require months of socialization. If you like the idea of working with a dog that may not be able to do more than sit at the other end of the leash and look away from you for a while, this might be something for you. The extremely shy dogs just need someone to be with them, to work with them to walk on a leash, and to be a solid foundation when they have new experiences.
Adoption Books- We have adoption books that we need to have updated regularly. Some go with us to adoption events and some are left at various stores for patrons to look through and discuss. As dogs are added to our program and adopted, the books need to be updated. You'd need to be able to pull their information from the web and create a document that can be printed. You'd also need to be able to print the pages and take those pages to your assigned location to update the available pets books.
Office work- we need help with updating files and tracking our current and adopted pets. There is a lot of information to be processed and filed. If you are handy with a computer, know MS Word and Excel and are willing to spend time learning what needs to be done and then working on it, we'd be happy to have you. This is one area where we are often behind!
Marketing- Are you in the business of marketing? We aren't. We need your expertise and help! We know there are things we could be doing that would get our name out there better, help us get more volunteers and donations, we just don't know exactly how to do that! Additionally, we are as large as we really want to get at this point, so we would need help with balancing more volunteers and foster homes with keeping about the same number of pets in our program as we have now. We are interested in continuing to work with smaller dogs and with small dogs that need a little extra help. We are very selective in the homes where our dogs end up and want to continue to offer great dogs to folks who have an understanding that there is more to a dog than the color of his fur or where he grew up!
Fund Raising- it is fair to say that our organization sucks at fundraising! We rely almost exclusively on adoption fees and donations made at adoption events for our program. This keeps our funding a bit lower than we'd like. We'd like to know that we are able to help the dogs or cats that need a surgery or have a medication that's a bit more than most without putting our group into a financial bind. Heartworm treatments, allergy issues, bladder stones, amputations, special diets- all of these are medical care we give our dogs and all of them place a certain level of strain on our finances! If you have experience in fund raising and can work independently with guidance from our president, we'd like to hear from you! All of our board members and many of our foster homes are swamped with the day-to-day care required to keep the group running and to keep the dogs healthy. We need someone who can run an event who does not require our board members to walk them through it or, in some cases, attend.