Rescue U volunteers have arrived at the Humane Society of West Michigan in Grand Rapids and begun a massive renovation project! We have a lot of work to do, and only a week to do it (the build is from Aug. 18-24). Among our projects:
- Thanks to all the generous people who donated via our Groupon Grassroots campaign, we raised enough money to put in a dog agility course and play area in a space that’s currently just a big, fenced-in area. Once the course is installed, the dogs will have plenty of activities to occupy them when they go out to the yard to play.
- There are some long dog runs in the back of the shelter that have a pea-gravel base that gets really hot in the summer and burns the paws of the dogs, so we are going to put AstroTurf in the dog runs, which will save paws and be much easier for the staff to clean.
- Inside the shelter, the area where the dogs are housed is extremely noisy, which stresses the dogs, so we are going to install sound baffling in the kennels to stop the echo and quiet the kennel down.
- We are going to add shelving to organize the shelter’s pet-food bank program, the Kibble Konnection, which helps low-income pet parents provide food for their pets.
- To help prevent the spread of disease among cats, we’re installing a sanitation barrier in the cat-intake area — a sheet of plastic resembling a shower curtain that will hang between the stacks of cages so that, when cats sneeze and cough, they don’t transmit upper-respiratory infections to the cats in the cages across from them.
- We’ll also be painting and organizing the reception/admitting area and the vet clinic.
This build is particularly exciting because most of the students — who come from Rescue U chapters at Central Michigan University, Grand Valley State University and Michigan State University — have never been on a Rescue U outreach trip before. Everyone is excited to take the skills they learn here back to the shelters where they volunteer regularly to improve the lives of even more pets.
Learn more about Rescue U.
