While manning the Midcoast Humane table at Pumpkinfest this year, my volunteer partner was someone I had not met before. As we did our best to keep our tabling materials from blowing off in the 40-plus-mph winds, Bill and I got to know each other.
A retired widower, Bill enjoys volunteering to keep busy and started doing so with Midcoast Humane when he was considering adopting a dog. It turned out that he decided adopting a dog wasn’t for him and that walking our dogs wasn’t either, but he still wanted to help around the shelter. Asking our community engagement manager what other roles he could fill that were not directly animal related, he was told about our laundry and dishes shifts. Very tactfully, he related to me that he wasn’t overly thrilled about laundry and dishes. I’m used to this; most people do not enjoy doing dishes and laundry in their own homes, why would they enjoy doing them at the shelter? So, I told him what I tell all volunteers (and staff!) who are less than thrilled by these chores: if dishes and laundry go down, the whole shelter goes down with them.
These seemingly mundane chores are the foundation upon which all the rest of the shelter’s work perches. We have 274 pets in the care of the Brunswick shelter today, with 90 of them in foster care and 30 pets being spayed and neutered in the clinic. Twenty-two pets are scheduled to come in from foster care for vaccine and treatment appointments today. That means that 184 meals will be prepared morning and evening, which translates to two bowls or puzzle feeders for each dog and a bowl for each cat (their wet food is delivered on quartered paper plates). All pets, including the ones in the clinic and having vaccine appointments, get clean and dry bedding as needed.
Cats tend to like to have the same bedding that they’ve gotten their scent on for as long as possible, so we leave their bedding with them when we can, removing it when it is soiled or when they are adopted. Dogs tend to need fresh bedding at least once daily. For puppies, the need to switch out their bedding can feel endless! Some days, all we’ve done is turn our backs on them and a puppy does their business on the blanket we just put down for them. Our machines keep track of poundage, and we wash between 500-600 pounds of laundry each day. The first person in in the morning starts the first load and it runs all day, largely manned by volunteers, until the closing manager makes sure the washers and dryers are turned off.
I explained all of that to Bill. I told him how valuable our volunteers are to keeping the shelter going and that there is no unimportant volunteer role; everything is to help the animals. We finished our windy shift at the table and went about our weekends. He reached out to me shortly after to tell me that he’d been thinking about what I had shared with him. He hadn’t realized how important dishes and laundry were in the shelter, that the volunteer shift doing them was so important to us and to the animals.
Bill stated that talking to me about how vital the role is to our everyday operations caused him to see the work in a new light and he has come for his shifts every week since. Much of what we do around the shelter is similar to dishes and laundry — routine, seemingly mundane and decidedly not glamorous, but deeply essential. Does it make doing dishes and turning over laundry more fun? No, probably not, but the feeling of laboring for the animals who cannot do it themselves brings a deep satisfaction and volunteers like Bill are worth their weight in gold to shelters.
Jess Townsend is executive director of Midcoast Humane.