Meeting

I just returned from tonight's volunteer meeting. We had a decent turnout again tonight with lots of great ideas included.

We have decided to postpone "this spring's" dog walk until next May (2013) to give us more time to plan. This will be our first fundraiser of this kind, and we all decided we needed to make sure to give ourselves enough time to plan ahead to make it successfull. We did not feel as though we had the "active volunteer base" needed to put together such a large event, and agreed to wait until we get more interested volunteers willing to attend meetings and head Chairs and Committees.

After this, we discussed some other fundraisers that we would be interested in hosting this year. Some ideas included:

• Spay & Neuter Clinic
• The President of TCHS has been searching for a local building we can get approved by the Dept. of Agriculture to steralize and use as a Spay and Neuter clinic for the public, and our shelter animals. It will be a low-cost clinic, but not just for low-income families. More on this topic will be discussed upon further discussion at later meetings.
• Calendars
• This was a GREAT idea one of the newer S&T student volunteers mentioned that we do to help raise money for the shelter. We can get some photos of our dogs and cats together to post into a calendar to sell with proceeds benefiting the shelter and its animals. A small blurb can be posted under each photo to tell its story. I love this idea, and can't wait to get started on it for next year.
• Celebrity Autograph Auction
• We talked about somehow accumulating autographed items from celebrities to auction off to raise money for the shelter animals. This was a very interesting idea presented by the VP - Katrina Macey.
• Dog Wash
• We held our first dog wash last July (2011) and it was very successfull and fun. We washed about 30 dogs total and raised a little over $500. We definitely plan to hold one or two more this coming summer. They were easy to plan and easy to put together with a couple of volunteers on-hand. We also offered nail trims. The wash raised money through donation-only. Meaning some people paid $1 for a dog wash and some people gave $50+ for a bath.

We have many more fundraisers planned for this year, and I look forward to sharing them as they come along.

Our first meeting of 2012

Tonight (Sunday) was the first volunteer meeting of 2012. We had a somewhat poor turnout, with 5 of us showing up total. Nevertheless, we had a great discussion and managed to come up with a lot of great fundraiser ideas for the upcoming year.

Some of the ideas we talked about incorporating into this years fundraiser schedule included:

• dog wash
• dog show
• selling pet treats
• pet walks (5k run/walk)
• psychic fair
• motorcycle rally
• adoption convention
• "fill a truck" (Hutcheson-Ford)

We had many more ideas, and many of these are repeats of successfull fundraisers we held last year.

Many of these fundraisers would require vendors, demonstrations and other fun things to keep people engaged and excited. If you know anybody who is interested in becoming a vendor at one of our events, please let me know. :)

I'm still working through my notes and getting them organized to write a more "profesh" article about what we talked about. If you would like to share any thoughts and ideas about fundraisers or anything, please comment.

We passed!

As some of you may know, last year the Dept. of Agriculture came at us hard with many citations involving our shelter... threatening to close us down for good. Lucky for us, most of the citations were cosmetic, and were easily fixed. We were able to replace an exhaust fan in the kennels so the dogs could have better circulated air, fix the tile in our cat rooms and much more with the donations of our kind Facebook followers. We raised over $1000 in just a week during this crisis to help keep our doors open.

With that donated money, we fixed everything. We were practically DARING the Dept. of Agriculture to come back and see what we've done.

Well, they did just that. And we passed the inspection with FLYING COLORS!!

We still have many more improvements to make, and the first one on our list is adding a quarantine area for new dogs and cats to stay until they are deemed healthy and ready for adoption. A quarantine area would prevent our healthy and adoptable dogs from becoming ill, and would also keep any diseases from spreading among the other animals.

Of course, these projects take MONEY. Something that is very scarce among our shelter all the time. We run entirely on donations provided through the public and we often come very close to shutting down for good due to lack of income. If you're in the Missouri area, please plan to attend our meeting this Sunday at the Days Inn & Suites in St. James. The meeting will begin at 5PM and should last no longer than an hour or so. We will be discussing 2012 fundraisers - and would appreciate everybody's wonderful and creative ideas.

If you're unable to attend, feel free to comment below with any ideas you may have! :)