Coming Soon to a Shelter Near You!

Well, hopefully something exciting will be coming to a shelter near you! Mama has a couple of projects in the works. First, for those of you on Facebook, mama wants you to go to Facebook and look for the group named Paws Around the World, appropriately acronymed "PAW". Then she wants you to request to join this group. Why, you might ask?

Because mama's got an idea. See, mama's workplace has a "Pet Picnic" every year where co-workers bring their pets to a local park and party down. This past year she started collecting donations of pet food to donate to a local pet shelter's food program. The food is collected and then distributed to families with pets who are struggling to feed those pets. This got mama thinking: Wouldn't it be cool if we could spread the word about projects for pet shelters so more people everywhere would see things going on in their communities that they could participate in and help pet shelters raise funds, adoptions, or awareness? Well "PAW" is aiming to be the means by which we can do just that!

Mama is still ironing out the details of how this Facebook group will work, but here's the gist of it: Say a Beagle rescue in Arkansas is planning a fund-raising event at Some Park. Say they want people to know about it. Say someone on Facebook's group, Paws Around the World, makes a post about this activity on the PAW facebook page. Then say someone in Arkansas, near Some Park, posts the activity on their own Facebook page. Then say that someone has 240 friends who see that activity posted on that someone's status update. Then say that out of the 240 friends who saw the activity on that someone's status update, 10 showed up to the event and donated $10 each. Then say of the 230 that didn't go to the event, 20 people donated $10 to the rescue group. That's $300 donated to the beagle rescue because one member of PAW posted the activity on their own Facebook page!

Now let's say that there are 200 members of the Facebook group Paws Around the World and that everyone who belongs to it makes a status post to advertise that beagle rescue's event (they'd know about it because they read about it at the PAW group page). And of those 200 status updates advertising the beagle rescue's event, 10 readers of those updates made a donation of $10 each from anywhere in the world. That's another $100 raised for the beagle rescue in Arkansas. So from one post made to the Paws Around the World Facebook grouop page, $400 was raised for the beagle rescue in Arkansas because they decided to hold a fundraising event at Some Park.

So get on over to Facebook, search for the group Paws Around the World (http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117458753114) and request to join! Activities won't start immediately; we'll need to wait until we get some members. And if anyone wants to help organize and administer this group with mama, be sure to make a comment to this post telling her so!

Now the other project: Food For People's Pets. This is a food program in Tucson, Az run by The Hermitage Cat Shelter. The aim of the FFPP program is to collect donations of pet food (not limited to cats) to provide to families in town struggling to feed their pets and at risk of surrendering or {gasp} abandoning them because they can't afford to feed them. Mama tried once before to help the group "get the word out" but is now trying again. We now have a new logo, adapted from the cat shelter's main logo by Deanna Terrell of Legacy Boxer Rescue in Texas. You'll be seeing alot of this logo around here, so get used to it. And while you're at it, get over to The Hermitage Cat Shelter (http://www.hermitagecats.org/) and make a donation to the Food For People's Pets program!