World Animal Day 2024: Care for Paws Service

As an annual tradition, my service group, Care for Paws creates an impact on the community on World Animal Day. This year, it was on October 4th, 2024. As we do every year, we put up our Anti-Animal Tourism Pledge to be signed by our school community. However, we did not want this to just be some boring piece of paper to sign. Therefore, as a group, we had a discussion and worked together to create a more interactive and appealing way for the community to sign the pledge. Some of the ideas were in digital forms, assemblies, written text, posters, etc. Combining these ideas together, we decided to present the pledge in a more visual way (as opposed to last year which was not so appealing), being a poster. I took the role of creating this poster, which can be seen below in Figure 1.

However, before all this, we decided to bring back our Care for Paws Instagram account. This platform allowed us to keep the community informed about our latest projects and accomplishments. This was one way that we advertised our pledge to be signed, alongside posters displayed around the school.

However, when it came to collecting the signatures of the community who pledged to the above information in Figure 1, we wanted to be able to display this in a creative and appealing way as well. Once again, with group discussion, we decided to create a large piece of paper with a striking visual for the community to sign on. To fit the theme of our service group, we painted on an emoji of a dog, which we worked on for one session. The dog emoji became the centerpiece of our pledge poster, symbolizing our dedication to animal welfare.

On October 4th, we put up our pledge and paper to sign on in a central area in our school campus. Even just after putting it up, we had several people come up and sign the paper. By the end of the day, we had received over 80 signatures. This was far more successful than our pledge last year. Thus, we were able to realize that our more visually striking and appealing projects would appeal to the community better.

All in all, the preparation towards World Animal Day was very successful, as well as the day itself with our great amount of signatures towards the pledge!