Paws Progress: Service Update (02/23 – 06/24)

Over the last four months, from February to June, our service, Care for Paws achieved several different accomplishments.

 

Firstly, on February 17th, we partnered with the Housing for Habitat (HfH) service group for the annual Home Run. Every year, our service groups help out as extra hands for HfH with any extra jobs they need. We started off by helping them plan the routes for this 6km run. Following this path, alongside the other leaders of HfH, we created pairs and groups of students mixed from both service groups with assigned jobs, such as giving directions throughout the path, being at water supplying areas, riding their bikes to make sure everyone is on track, stay in the truck to pick people up on the way, and many more. This process of planning went quite smoothly, as our teamwork and collaboration were working well. On the day of the actual event of the Home Run, there was a great show of people, of 84 runners. Hope for Kids was able to raise 150,000 LKR, of which we were given around 25% for our extra help.

 

Throughout the end of March and beginning of April, we created and set up donation drive boxes around the school, such as in the cafe and canteen. I created 14 visual posters of stray dog facts that would encourage students, teachers, parents, and staff to donate. These posters were shared each day on the daily bulletin, for 2 weeks, alternating each day. This way, we were able to spread this information of the stray dog facts to all communities in our school, in order to persuade people to donate to our service to help with these issues/facts. We made sure that these facts were relevant to Sri Lanka, and would connect with our goals and services as a group. All in all, from these donation boxes and poster prompts to encourage people to donate, we were able to raise around 8000 LKR.

Here are some examples of the posters I created:

 

On the last day of school, on June 13th, I was assigned as the service leader to present at the end-of-year assembly about a recap of our accomplishments this year. I spoke about our successes of this year, such as the sterilization camps, where 68 animals got immunizations and treatment, and 56 got sterilizations, as well as our donation drives, such as through charities like bake sales. I spoke about how we used this money to donate to other local organizations and individuals who followed the same aim as us, of helping the street animal population.