Beans for Bags: Olympic Mountain Pet Pals

Oct 13

Olympic Mountain Pet Pals is an all-volunteer organization serving Jefferson County. We actively promote spay and neuter programs to reduce overpopulation of dogs and cats that leads to homeless animals. We do this by providing financial support that helps low-income residents to spay and neuter their pets. We also sponsor therapy dog programs to serve schoolkids learning to read through our Read to Rover program and to visit with seniors in assisted living centers through our Pets to People program.

We make a positive difference in the lives of our clients. Our low-income spay/neuter program helped an elderly woman whose son had to move in with her because of the pandemic. She was afraid her female dog would have puppies with the new dog in the household. We financed spay and neuter for the two dogs and put her mind at ease.

Cat-Wearing-COVID-19-Mask OLY PET PALS.jpg

Like everything about our lives in 2020, COVID-19 has had an impact on the activities of Pet Pals. On one hand, the economic crisis increases the needs of low-income families while there is no decline in the number of cats and dogs that can benefit from vet services. We have provided help for spaying or neutering 113 local pets so far this year (January through June). The funds raised by the Co-op Beans for Bags program will continue to go toward supporting low-income spay and neuter services, even as we pursue new cost-effective models and partnerships for the future.

Read to Rover at the library before COVID-19.

On the other hand, our therapy dog programs experienced a shock when schools shut down in March and volunteers were no longer welcome to visit assisted living homes. Our amazing and dedicated Read to Rover teams refused to give up on trying to stay connected with our readers.

We just had to get more creative. Some of the dogs helped their humans generate electronic messages for the teachers to send to their kids. The teams, masked and socially distanced, joined in the end-of-year car parade to say good-bye and encourage kids to keep reading over the summer. Then, we worked with the local libraries to experiment with a virtual summer Read to Rover program. We are looking forward to finding innovative ways for our Read to Rover dogs to contribute to literacy efforts in the upcoming school year.

For more information, please visit our website: http://ompetpals.org/