Still Around

It’s almost been a year since I started my job at the animal shelter as Volunteer Coordinator. What started off as a grant funded only position, has since been approved to become permanent!! YEAH!! It’s been a long road of learning systems, maneuvering through events, hoops and challenges, meeting a lot of new people and furry friends, while trying to engage more in one of my hobbies, photography.

Learning the volunteer program, Volgistics, and mapping and cleaning up records was fun😉. It took FOREVER to get past documents uploaded and saved in the shared computer folders. And just when I thought I was all good…someone finds a whole stack of old waivers in the administrative assistance file cabinet that had quit. Yup, I wanted to bang my head on a wall. That paperwork will have to wait until my position restarts July 1st because I’m down to roughly 14 hours per week (1,000 hour employee or one year of service, whichever comes first). A lot of my hours went to foster/rescue coordinating when we lost our assistance manager/foster/rescue coordinator because I was the only one that understood the system and had access to foster contacts through our volunteer program. Moving animals out of the shelter was well worth my time!🐾

This year, I had a lot of fun organizing my first Volunteer Appreciation month & day. We don’t have much of a budget, so I made do with what I could. I printed everyone a certificate of appreciation and created specialty certificates for those who served the most in the prior year and took on special requests tasks like reading to kids, helping me make fair poo for education, or cutting & sewing our larger blankets to a smaller size to fit better on our shelter dog sleeping areas in their kennels. There was a lot of laughter, kind words, and amazing conversations.

With all my learning curves and taking on other tasks, I haven’t gotten to work with the shelter dogs much. I think things will be different come July 1st when my time restarts though. Fingers crossed! It’s been bitter sweet. Though I don’t have enough time to do all the things I should be doing at the shelter, it’s opened up time for me to get caught up around the home and on my photography hobby. I have more then I need in backdrops at this point🫣. …That I will eventually use on beings other than our dogs and gradbaby.

As for the otter picture…that was during my husbands and mines anniversary trip to Homer, Alaska. I added it for fun because wildlife photography is one of my favorites.