Here at Pets of the Homeless (POTH), there’s always plenty to do but once every 3 months, we take on our biggest task of all and that’s packing pet food! Let us take you behind the scenes of how our packing day works and what makes this particular job so essential for keeping best friends together.
Packing day brings together over 20+ of our volunteers in one giant coordinated effort. Your generous donations must be sorted, packed and then transported to community partners all across Metropolitan Victoria. It’s a big job but a lot of fun – imagine the buzz generated by all those volunteers sorting over 1000kg of food!
We want to share how our packing day works and what makes this particular job so essential for keeping best friends together.
Come packing day, we hire a hall large enough for all of us, and then we get to work. The real challenge however happens the day before where we have to move all the food from our storage unit and transport it to hall ready for the volunteers. Why do we have to pack? While we tend to buy pet food in bulk to feed our many hungry friends, those large packages sure do take up a lot of space. Instead, we divide the food into small zip lock bags, labelling each with the date and brand of food to help with identification and sorting – dog food here, cat food over there! These small bags are more efficient to transport and make storage and distribution simpler for our community partners. Though this level of coordination is stressful (just ask our CEO, Yvonne!), our hard work on packing day makes the whole process easier for our community partners down the track.
All this transportation and storage is one of the main reasons we can’t accept opened food donations. We do however accept food within 6 months of its best before date. If it’s good quality pet food, relatively new and you would like to donate, please get in touch to find your nearest collection point!
Though hiring a hall has suited us for our packing days so far, we’ve found that – as our operations expand and we continue to help more people and pets experiencing homelessness – we need a bigger and better space to service our growing needs.
If it’s good quality pet food, relatively new and you would like to donate, please get in touch to find your nearest collection point.
As we’ve mentioned in a previous post, we’re working towards establishing Victoria’s very first Pet Food Bank – a permanent space where we can more effectively store and organise the generous donations of pet food supplied by supporters just like you. The Pet Food Bank will also provide a home base for Pets of the Homeless, making it possible for us to provide additional services such as veterinary checks and emergency boarding. More space means better logistics, and better logistics means we can focus our time and energy on what we love to do: keeping best friends together.
If you’d like to volunteer your time to help with packing days, you can subscribe to our newsletter to be notified of future events. And, in case you haven’t heard the good news, our blog is a finalist in the 2017 BUPA Blog Awards! Until Friday 13 October, you can cast your vote for POTH in the People’s Choice Category and show your support for people and pets facing homelessness together.
Written by Nicholas Corbett and edited by Kara Smith
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