Carolina Border
Collie Rescue
Many people may not be aware of the behind scenes work done by the many volunteers who give their spare time to Carolina Border Collie Rescue. The numerous phone calls and e-mails from folks who expect immediate attention and assistance.
Rescue operations require the total dedication of volunteers in order to exist. We do it out of love for the breed and a dedication to help eradicate the widespread over population of dogs. And, we do it along with full time jobs, family responsibilities, and our own pets that need care and attention.
CBCR has volunteers who serve in all capacities from home visits, manning booths, answering emails, evaluating dogs, taking pictures of dogs, to fostering. There is no job more important than another. However without foster homes, it would be impossible to operate our rescue group. Very few rescue groups nationwide, breed-specific or mixed breed, have kennels available to house dogs waiting for placement. CBCR relies fully on their outstanding foster homes to do this for us. In exchange, they have the satisfaction of knowing that their efforts to provide a positive environment, gives each fostered Border Collie a new chance at a forever home.
Fostering is not the only way you can help CBCR in their rescue efforts. We need people all over North Carolina to do home visits evaluating potential adopters. Learning to match special dogs with approved homes is as important as fostering. Other volunteers evaluate dogs that are being relinquished by their owners, or found in shelters. This requires being able to temperament test dogs, understand border collies and recognize what dogs are adoptable. Certain volunteers help by keeping track of which dogs are waiting for foster care, what homes need home evaluations, and which homes are best for certain types of dogs. These volunteers share this information with other volunteers in order to make the actual adoptions take place.
And the list of jobs goes on! We also need people who can work at our table during events where we do fundraising. (Which is critical to paying the vet bills incurred with each dog that comes into our program.) CBCR can be seen at flyball and agility tournaments, sheep dog trials, and other pet related events. But we can't have a table unless we have volunteers to staff the table. We also have a treasurer who monitors all of the cash flow, board members who make 'final calls' on business issues, a webmaster who keeps the website up to date, and a lot of other folks who can not be thanked enough.
Then there is transportation. What rescue organization would exist without members who help with transporting the animals? It always seems the dog in need of rescuing is in one place, and the foster home is clear across the state. When this happens, we scramble to get drivers to pick up the dog and get it to the foster home. Usually, we don't have much time either because the dog is in a shelter and needs to get out immediately. Volunteering to drive just one 1-2 hour leg of the journey would make a big difference.
But you wanna know the secret? We all do one, or more these tasks for two reasons; each of us truly loves our border collies and there are too many dogs and not enough volunteers to save them all. But we try....one by one. It is not the size of the job, but the impact of what you do. Sometimes there are as many as seven different people involved with the placement of a single dog. Not one link in that chain is expendable.
Here are just two of the jobs we need a volunteer for:
-
Vet Policy/Boarding Facility Volunteer - Generate a list of vets and boarding facilities willing to give CBCR a price break. Every attempt possible must be made to find low cost services for our foster dogs. Give these facilities names and contacts, if needed, and keep them updated on changes to the CBCR membership.
- Matchmaker - Work with our Application List to match people and dogs. This would involve matching people with dogs on our Available Dogs list as well as other dogs we know are looking for new homes, but are not currently being fostered by CBCR members.
If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Ann Miller, our Volunteer Coordinator, for more information: annMiller@nc.rr.com or 919.682.6125, (prior to 21:00 please).