Friday, October 21, 2011

There are Volunteers and then there are VOLUNTEERS!

I first met Maggie when I started fostering.  I took home a cat with an Upper Respiratory Infection so he could get better, but instead of getting better, he got worse, and stopped eating.  In a panic, I got in touch with the staff at TLAC, and they introduced me to Maggie, who taught me how to force feed the cat so that he wouldn’t get even sicker.  She was kind, friendly and capable and got me through the first crisis of my volunteering with TLAC.
Since then, I’ve learned that Maggie is pretty amazing, although I doubt she’d tell you that herself. It’s not just that she’s been a volunteer for 9 years.  It’s also that she’s a super foster parent.  Most of the time, she has at least half a dozen foster cats at home, and they’re not easy fosters.  They’re sick cats, or cats that have stopped eating, or need extra-special care for one reason or another.  I’ve never heard of her turning down a needy foster, and she often asks to take home cats with a very dim prognosis.  Usually she and her husband Mike manage to pull them through, but she’s lost several and keeps taking more cats, even though she cries over each cat that doesn’t make it. Her husband even maintains a blog about the trials and tribulations at Mike and Maggie's B&B "Tangent Oaks"


Just her fostering would make her special enough, but Maggie is also very actively involved with two other programs.  She helped create and co-manages the Nebulization and Special Feeding teams that care for the cats with URIs and cats that have stopped eating in the shelter environment.  She also created and co-manages the Desperate Housecats adoption event which showcases cats that need extra help getting adopted because of age, medical condition or lengthy stays at the shelter.  Maggie attends the events, helps photograph the cats, and writes a marketing flyer for every cat in the program.  In the year that it has been in operation, Desperate Housecats has placed about 120 cats at events alone, and countless others have been adopted from foster or the shelter due to Desperate Housecats marketing.


I’m so glad that I get to work with Maggie.  She’s an inspiration, and the very definition of what makes the volunteers at TLAC so special.


Fellow Volunteer and Foster Mom, 
R.E.

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