It's time to fortify, reinforce, and strengthen the new Dog Sanctuary!
We're standing at the crossroads, the place where we have to make our biggest decisions. We're spending day-in-day-out, no joke, making the two locations work in tandem, in a constantly-rotating schedule. This is no easy task. We've had 6 people working full time (not counting myself, the 7th) keeping the Sanctuaries watched, attended, and dogs fully cared for.
Money has been needed faster and more often than ever before, as paying multiple full-time staff members has totally changed our budget system. For manpower alone, it seems to cost twice-as-much to operate two locations as one, even with the same amount of dogs. Volunteers are no longer enough, and I dreamed of having a full-time paid staff to help fill the basic and common needs of everyday for both locations.
Only thanks to our recent fundraiser has the following been possible:
Somehow, since July 4th when we moved in, we've operated these 2 locations non-stop for over a month with full staffing.
Thank you to the donators, sponsors, and supporters who made that happen!!! 😁
The truth is, without the volunteers and employees combined, we'd have not been able to make it this far.
The destiny of Perros Libres used to feel as if it was all in my hands, and if I just accidentally let go, it would fall to pieces. I easily managed the work of 3-4 people on my own on a daily basis before having the team we have now.
Without this whole team, there could not be a Perros Libres of this size. We would have had to do what all the other Sanctuaries had to do: close or minimize. We did not minimize, like was suggested, but instead divided and expanded. Thanks to the help of many this is possible.
So my biggest challenge lately: is building the happy team.
Many have complained over the years how tough this job is. Jeez, no kidding. This work is not for the feint of heart, but instead the hardy and robust. We are dog warriors. Warriors for peace, equality, tranquility, and prosperity for the dogs.
We vaccinated more puppies! Everyone's up-to-date!
With a lot of previous help and education, we give our own vaccines!
Thanks to the Dox Project for donating all these vaccines and first showing us how!
Thanks to Casa Suli's Animal Foundation for having donated us a fridge so we can keep vaccines cold! This is a real group effort! We certainly have had a lot of people on our side.
Thank you to:
Diego
Carolena
Sonny
Lucas
Hugo
Valeria
Elli
Lara
Angus
Rhiannon
Sian
Esteban
Stephi
Without ALL of these people we would have not been stable and structured. This has been almost the entire time for the last 2 months, with everyone in-and-out in different time frames.
Mange & Kennel cough: Dang! We've seen these two a lot.
There's always new illnesses to handle: we've seen kennel cough and a new wave of mange from some unfortunately neglected puppies who really need some serious fresh mange-treatment. Look at the photo below and see one of the worst cases of mange I've seen on puppies:
Don't worry: we're on the case!
We've got a whole plan with these babes and are gonna take excellent care of them. We will update on their progress as we go. Always more work to do!
We use a special combination of natural medicines in the treatment of mange that we find more effective than the typical treatment with antibiotics. We have done every single kind of mange treatment I've nearly ever seen, and we will explain this and show examples with our update on the puppies condition.
We completed the fundraiser!!!
The money raised for the "Emergency build-a-shelter" fundraiser has been a success. We had raised over $8,000 USD to take care of the Sanctuaries, and make a basic structure on the second that the doggies can live in safely. It's quite a ways from where we want it to be, but we've done SO MUCH in the last month and have a lot more infrastructure (and running water!) I've got a video here where you're looking through some of the new fencing built with our funding and a tiny sneak-peek into the new Sanctuary space.
The money raised has been used, effectively, maintaining both sanctuaries at the same time and provided us tons of materials and funding for the workers mainly: now I don't just mean the Guatemalan laborers who help us build, but the whole team who is now our rotating-staff of workers. This includes people from different areas: our team is very multi-cultural!
We need help to fund next month! If you can support, please consider donating today!
This is the difficult truth that has dawned on me, with my best efforts at organizing our team and fundraising and raising budget: our staff and sanctuary is not sustainable currently, and we are in need of funding to be able to get through August into the next month.
We've never had such a large group of people working with us at one time. We need your aid to keep it moving!
Once again, we stand at the crossroads. Waiting to see which way we turn, and how we perfect our system and organization to maintain care of these dogs. We sincerely, and most truly, need your support now more than ever to survive these difficult times.
If you're of sound ability and wish to help us maintain our dogs, feed the babies, get medicine for the puppies, get puppy milk, buy more wood, hire people to help us build our facilities, and keep food on our table and in our doggie-bowls, please aid us today. Here is the donate button below.
Please friends, if you can help us today, we humbly ask for your help today.
Lastly, our apologies to our sponsors who have not received update emails in awhile!
Our sponsors are HUGELY important to us, as you guys are our life-blood and the reason we are able to stay here. We value your time, your attention, your spreading-the-word of our cause, and your support infinitely. We promise to start sending out sponsorship emails this month of August to update all of our sponsors, and sincerely hope you can forgive the time that has eloped. Our focus has been keeping the animals safe, healthy, and happy and I'm so honored to say that is going incredibly well.
Thank you everyone.
Libertad para los perros.
Y Buenas noches!