CASA Turns ONE!
Wow! One year. It is amazing what can be accomplished in 365 days. A little over a year ago we started dreaming about starting CASA. What would it look like? What could we accomplish with an organization dedicated to transport? Could we get volunteers? Could we raise enough money to fund it? What location made sense for the building, and would we be able to afford it? We had a lot more questions than answers, but we had big dreams, big plans, and enough vision to take a big risk. The animals were counting on us to succeed after all.
February 14, 2021- First CASA Board Meeting and the image that ended up becoming our logo!
In many ways it’s been the hardest year of our lives, but it has also been incredibly rewarding and inspiring. Our vision was one born out of necessity. Transport is a lot of work, and it is hard work. And most importantly it is not cheap and does not have a revenue stream to self-fund. Transport comes with a lot of logistical hurdles and the biggest of those is health certificate vetting. Most clinics charge a fortune for it and hate to do it. They put a lot of restrictions on how many animals can come at one time and when they can come. Rescue groups love to tag animals up to the last minute, so to save the maximum number of animals each transport, we needed a flexible, convenient and cheaper vetting option.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get vets to come to us?? That’s the question that sparked a lot of our current operation. Gathering the animals to a central location and having a vet come to us to do the exams and vaccinating has been a game changer for us in terms of efficiency and cost. What we did not foresee was the immense amount of work that goes into each vetting day, but thankfully we have an amazing team of volunteers that have rallied around us to help us achieve this important goal. We also have a remarkable and generous vet team.
Dr Gordon is one of the amazing vets that gives his time weekly to help us with health cert vetting. He has been with us from our very first health cert day on 4/21/21!
Our second hurdle in transport was the bottleneck of spay/neuter availability at clinics. If we had a building and vets, couldn’t we create a surgery suite?? That was always part of the dream for CASA, and we are SO PROUD to have accomplished it within our first 12 months of operation. Like most things in life, it was more difficult and more expensive than we had anticipated, but we persevered, and people came through financially in a huge way. We were able to perform our inaugural surgery day on 2/26/22!
We have been surprised, humbled and blessed by the amazing group of people that have come together to support the mission of CASA. Together we have transported over 2,600 animals from hopeless to home in our first year of operation and altered 97 in our first two months of operating a surgery suite. We love teamwork because amazing things can be accomplished when we work together towards a common goal. Together we have logged well over 6,600 volunteer hours in our first year of operation.
From all of us at CASA, THANK YOU for an amazing year. We’re just getting started and we look forward to accomplishing even bigger things in 2022!