No matter your age or experience in life, it’s never too early or late to be a hero for shelter pets in need. Amazingly, we are fortunate enough to have incredible youth in our community supporting the efforts of ARL each day by putting together impressively creative fundraisers and projects every day. Here are some of the unique ways our young supporters are rallying together for animals at ARL!
Chase’s BIG Donation Drive
His journey to helping animals at ARL made local headlines. It even made an appearance in the award-winning children’s magazine Jack and Jill. And it all started with just one heartfelt thought: “I wish I could help animals who don’t have homes”.
At just ten years old, Chase Novik, who has been a lifelong animal lover, reached out to us at the beginning of 2023 asking what items our animals needed most at the shelter. From there, he rallied together many local businesses to set up donation boxes for ARL, even contacting warehouses like Chewy’s to help collect as many donations as possible. But what started out as the hopes to collect one or two boxes of items quickly turned into a movement in our community, and soon, over 800 items were waiting to be donated to ARL! Chase’s donation drive turned out to be bigger than anyone could have imagined, with hundreds of toys, bags of food, pet supplies, and so much more delivered to our animals this past February.
Girl Scout Brownie Troop #1704’s Cat Scratcher Tutorial
When a local Girl Scout Brownie Troop wanted to support ARL while earning their Bronze Award, they reached out to learn how they could volunteer their time at the shelter in a sustainable way. Knowing we often have other children’s groups looking to get involved at the shelter, they came up with an incredible idea: What better way for kids to learn how to make toys for shelter animals than from other kids? Recycling their Girl Scout cookie cartons, the girls were able to figure out how to make cat scratchers that can fit in our cat kennels, and now, they are in the process of filming the tutorial for our website! We will share the final product on our website when the girls have completed their project.
Pages for Pets: A One-of-a-Kind Partnership between ARL and Reading District Libraries
What does children reading have to do with ARL? Well, as it turns out, a lot more than you might think! During this year’s summer reading program across all Berks County libraries, young readers were challenged to log their minutes read to unlock the sponsorship of a pet at ARL, with a big goal of 500,000 minutes read from June – July. The goal was big, but the children’s enthusiasm to help a shelter get adopted was even bigger, and they surpassed their goal with a total of 680,000 minutes read! All their hard efforts went to the adoption of Agent 007, who is still waiting for a forever home at the time of writing this post. Learn more about Agent 007 and his story here!
Above this partnership, many libraries partnered up with ARL to host their own donation drives, and we would like to take a moment to recognize them! Thank you so much to Schuylkill Valley, Bernville, Spring, West Lawn, Mifflin, and Boone Area Public Libraries for supporting animals in our shelter by placing donation bins in their facilities.
The Morgan School’s Peanut Butter and Cheese Drive
While we tend to see a lot of youth support from older children, that doesn’t mean younger children can’t benefit from participating in donation drives for ARL! At The Morgan School, children as young as a few months old – five years old and their families rallied together to collect peanut butter and spray cheese for our dogs this past spring. The kids were excited to share tasty treats with our dogs, and they got to learn all about what the animal shelter is and why it matters! Not only did this drive make for dozens of happy shelter dogs, but it was an incredible learning experience for these young animal advocates as well.
One Family’s Kindness
When Alejandra and her children heard about ARL being past capacity this past July, they were eager to help in any way possible – especially after having adopted their own beloved dog from the shelter. Together, they rounded up dog food, toys, and even treats for the staff to show their support!
Birthday Fundraisers
We are fortunate enough to have many young animal advocates in our community requesting donations for animals at ARL in lieu of birthday presents! Check out Lily (pictured left) and Liv (pictured right), who recently stopped by the shelter this year to drop off their donations received in honor of their birthdays!
We are so grateful to each and every one of these young animal advocates who continue to show support and compassion for animals at ARL. While these are some of the names and faces we recognize from this past year, we want to thank all of our young donors who have contributed to our shelter in any shape or form, whether we got the opportunity to meet with them or not. If your child is interested in supporting the ARL, we encourage you to check out our idea guide here, and don’t forget to get in touch with us so we can properly thank them and offer your family a tour of the shelter! Please contact Alison Kleinsmith at akleinsmith@berksarl.org to get started.
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