Ready for a Road Trip!

This Sunday I will climb in a van with seven other volunteers and head south to visit six of our partner shelters in North and South Carolina.

We have three goals –

We will put ‘boots on the ground’ as one of our team members put it, spending our days working in the shelters, helping with whatever they need. We are all prepared to get dirty and tackle tasks from cleaning kennels to trimming toenails. We are bringing the skills to assist with marketing the dogs, from writing bios and tweaking social media efforts, to taking professional quality photos and capturing videos. We will do whatever we can to help the dogs and the heroes who spend their days on the front lines working to save every dog they can.
Our second goal is to raise awareness. Ever since visiting rural shelters last fall, I’ve been convinced that the biggest reason so many good dogs are dying in our shelters is not simply because there is a lack of resources or space or spay/neuter (all of which certainly play into it), but because people simply don’t know this is happening. Or maybe they don’t believe it. By bearing witness and then sharing all that we see and hear and experience, I believe we can motivate people to get involved and demand change.
Our last goal is to bring hope in the form of much-needed resources to shelters that are coming off a brutal fall/winter and preparing to deal with what could be a heartworm epidemic thanks to all the standing water left behind by the big southern storms. We will take as many donations as we can squeeze in the van, but being in the shelters each day will give us a better idea of exactly what they need. In the evenings, after cleaning up and eating dinner, we will gather to review what we learned and decide how to spend the donation money designated for that shelter. Many will need basics not included in the average government shelter budget—flea/tick meds, kitten formula, harnesses, dewormers.

Too many dogs are suffering and perishing in our shelters unnecessarily. It is a fixable problem – if only more people wanted to fix it.

And I believe they would fix it, if they only knew it was happening.

So, we’re headed south and we plan to share all that we see and experience.

You can follow along with us on Facebook through our page, OPH Rescue Road Trip, where we will be posting pictures, stories, updates, and videos all week long. I hope you will follow and I hope you will share – you can be a part of this mission simply by telling others about it.

If you’d like to make a donation towards our trip and the purchase of supplies for the shelters, you can do so through our ongoing fundraiser on Facebook, or by donating through the OPH website and designating your donation for the “Rescue Road Trip.”

I hope to post a few times on the blog next week but forgive me if I’m not able to get to it – I promise a full update when I get back. Meanwhile, let me introduce you to the amazing team I am traveling with:

Thanks for reading!

If you’d like to know more about my blogs and books, visit CaraWrites.com or subscribe to my occasional e-newsletter.

If you’d like to know more about the book, Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs, visit AnotherGoodDog.org, where you can find pictures of the dogs from the book (and some of their happily-ever-after stories), information on fostering, the schedule of signings, and what you can do right now to help shelter animals! You can also purchase a signed copy or several other items whose profits benefit shelter dogs!

If you’d like to know how you can volunteer, foster, adopt or donate with OPH, click here. And if you’d like more pictures and videos of my foster dogs past and present, be sure to join the Another Good Dog Facebook group.

I love hearing from readers, so please feel free to comment here on the blog, email carasueachterberg@gmail.com or connect with me on Facebook, twitter, or Instagram.

Best,

Cara

Released August 2018 from Pegasus Books and available now