Pawfee Podcats Gremi (Grace Clinton & Emi Griess)

Jen, formerly referred to as The Bunny Volunteer, graced us with her presence in this episode during her one month serving our humane society as interim Volunteer Coordinator. As a team member who volunteered for 8 years before becoming a staff member (and as a most excellent human being whom we'd all like to be when we grow up), Jen has valuable insights to share in this episode. We are pleased to announce that after her time as a staff member, Jen has now joined our Board of Directors!

Helping Hands Humane Society is an open admission shelter with contracts with city and county Animal Control. We take in over 6,000 lost and homeless animals each year. We are located in Topeka, Kansas and strive to also be a resource center for our community. We have a pet food pantry and just this year opened our Community Clinic which provides low-cost spays and neuters to qualifying individuals, as well as working with local rescue groups to get community and stray animals fixed. We have approximately 50 staff members and hundreds of amazing volunteers and fosters.

If you have any questions, comments, stories, or ideas for our podcast, please email us at grace.clinton@hhhstopeka.org (Director of Philanthropy) or emi.griess@hhhstopeka.org (Communications Coordinator).

We're back! Apologies for the hiatus - it's been a busy season here at Helping Hands Humane Society, but five of our employees from varying departments just returned from the Best Friends Animal Society National Conference with LOTS of ideas and motivation to try some new things at our shelter! This episode is hosted by Grace, Director of Business Development and Special Events Emi, Communications Coordinator, and Shelby, Volunteer Coordinator (now collectively known as "Gremis") with a special guest appearance by Katie, Fundraising Assistant. In this episode we tackle language in response to several comments, memes, and social media posts we have seen lately. When we as a shelter start posting about how many animals are coming in and how full we are, there seems to be an immediate response from the community to blame and shame pet owners. While we do appreciate that perspectives have shifted away from blaming the shelter, we would rather all work together as a team to tackle the issues here, many of which have more to do with a lack of access to resources than malicious intent. We'd also invite everyone to remember that humans make mistakes, and all pet owners are human. We open up about some of our own very human moments and share valuable information we learned from a HeARTs Speak webinar about positive marketing as well as the Best Friends Conference about why positive marketing is really the way to go if you want to help more animals!

Helping Hands Humane Society is an open admission shelter with contracts with city and county Animal Control. We take in over 6,000 lost and homeless animals each year. We are located in Topeka, Kansas and strive to also be a resource center for our community. We have a pet food pantry and just this year opened our Community Clinic which provides low-cost spays and neuters to qualifying individuals, as well as working with local rescue groups to get community and stray animals fixed. We have less than 50 staff members and hundreds of amazing volunteers and fosters. If you have any questions, comments, stories, or ideas for our podcast, please email us at gracec@hhhstopeka.org or emig@hhhstopeka.org.

In this episode we interview long-time volunteer Jen, who just so happens to be an expert bunny owner and foster! She tells us all about how she got started volunteering at HHHS, what she's done to advocate for bunnies, and what it's like to foster buns and have buns as pets. We also talk about the recent experience at our shelter of having 14 rabbits abandoned in poor condition. Jen and her daughter Amelia helped immensely in that situation!

In this episode, you're hosts Grace and Emi (Gremi) are joined by coworker, Volunteer Coordinator, Shelby for some updates on adopted pets, painting offices, shelter animals, and more. They are interrupted several times - Lindsay the Behavior Specialist jumps in impromptu to talk about another shelter dog sent to be trained in search and rescue! And Kim the Adoption Counselor pops her head in to let us know staff favorite, cat Channing is going home!

Shelby also reveals the DNA results of her puppy Franklin, recently adopted from HHHS!

If you have questions, ideas, stories to share - please contact us at gracec@hhhstopeka.org or emig@hhhstopeka.org.

After a VERY busy season at HHHS, we're back at podcasting with an episode including interviews with TWO of our esteemed coworkers - relative newbie, Shelby, and 5-year dedicated employee, Marrissa! We dive into how they came to work at HHHS and what they do day-to-day at the shelter. Of course, the interviews also include some wacky, funny, and interesting stories that always come along with humane society life. As usual, we are excited to share behind-the-scenes information about working at an animal shelter as well as career insights to those who might be considering a job with animals!

Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or stories for our podcast at emig@hhhstopeka.org and/or gracec@hhhstopeka.org. Thanks for listening!

In this episode we interview the fabulous Cynthia Huebner about the dog she adopted in 2020, Doug. Doug was a staff favorite here at HHHS and suffered from some doggy anxiety. He landed the perfect home with Cynthia (she says he picked her), and we get some updates about how he adjusted to his new home and how he's doing now. We wanted to cover this topic because August is Clear the Shelters month, and a huge population of shelter animals needing homes is large breed dogs who have some behavior quirks.