We broke ground yesterday on our temporary homeless-run animal shelter
Thank you to everyone who has donated to our campaign to raise funds to build and operate our new homeless-run animal shelter. And thanks to The Dodo for publishing our article and video about the project and for doing such a great job in publicizing it, and to Democracy Now for reporting on it. We have already raised more than 15% of our fundraising target for the year.
We are currently in the process of selecting where our permanent location will be. We expect to have the lease closed on the new property by the end of July. Construction of the shelter should take an additional 10–12 weeks.
In the meantime, we have decided, for several reasons, to build a temporary shelter. To do that, we are using, and significantly expanding and improving, the makeshift shelter currently run by Karollyne. She is the trans woman who heads a homeless family that for years has squatted in an abandoned property in the forest of Rio de Janeiro, where they take care of dozens of abandoned dogs and cats.
Last year, along with Field of Vision, the filmmaking division run by Laura Poitras, I produced a short film about Karollyne and her devotion to caring for abandoned animals. We are thrilled that she has agreed to become one of our first homeless employees to work at our shelter. We also will take roughly half of the dogs she is currently caring for that she believes would be better off in a shelter and placed for adoption.
Despite how much she loves her animals, and how well she cares for them, there are some unsafe and otherwise less-than-ideal conditions there. We created a building plan that will resolve the worst of those problems and create safe, clean, professionalized conditions for the animals.
We are working with the two dozen volunteers we already have for our project, as well as with the two homeless employees we have hired thus far for the shelter (Karollyne and Lucas, who appears in our original video). Our Executive Director, Francisco David, previously worked overseeing similar construction projects and is doing the same here.
Yesterday, we broke ground on this work. Francisco worked with engineers to develop the blueprints. The materials began arriving today, and work began, all while the couple dozen dogs and cats who live there energetically played.
Moreover, Karollyne was, in many ways, the inspiration for this project; it was seeing her example of devotion to animals in need that inspired us to want to create a new type of shelter that taps into the powerful and beautiful bond between homeless people and their pets. And since Karollyne will work at our shelter, and will continue to rescue animals on her own, improving the conditions there for these animals is completely in the spirit of our mission.
Finally, and most critically, professionalizing the shelter at Karollyne’s will enable us to study and better understand exactly how we need to best manage the permanent (and much larger) shelter once it’s built. This will be a microcosm for what we’re building, and we have roughly 3 months to study it.
After spending two months organizing ourselves and doing research, our staff and volunteers yesterday were extremely excited yesterday to get to work in earnest in bringing this project to fruition. That we were able to work surrounded by so many amazing dogs and cats, and the extraordinary homeless family that cares for them with such compassion, sacrifice, and devotion, made it even more rewarding.
Anyone who wishes to support our project — which we believe and hope can inspire similar projects to help both homeless and animal populations around the world — can do so here.
