With a mission to support animals in need, Shelter, Homeless & Foster Animal Advocates plan to donate money and supplies to local animal shelters.

“Last year, I actually adopted a dog from a shelter. He’s really just been a good friend to me, and he’s given me a lot of love,” SHFAA founder and president junior Marc Chae said. “I wanted to start SHFAA because I thought that helping out animals that don’t have homes yet would be a good use of my time after school. This is something that’s pretty important to me, and I think it can affect a lot of people.”

Local shelters like The Animal Foundation and the Nevada SPCA are struggling to accommodate the influx of animals after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The conditions in those shelters have really worsened because of the pandemic,” adviser Jessica Kelly said. “People were adopting a lot of pets because they were just hanging out at home, but after coming back to their jobs they realized that they couldn’t take care of them anymore and were just giving them back to the shelters, causing some problems like a lack of resources because of how many animals were in there.”

To combat this, SHFAA is planning various club activities to not only shed light on this situation, but to attempt to improve the circumstances at local shelters. Their ideas range from taking their members off campus, to crowdsourcing donations.

“One thing I really want to do is have everyone take a field trip to an animal shelter,” Chae said. “We’ve also thought of doing some sort of drive, like having other people give us their blankets to donate.”

The club also intends to fundraise throughout the school year with hopes to donate a large portion of their earnings to various shelters. They plan to take inspiration from a few previous successful fundraisers hosted by other clubs, such as BSU’s Cane’s fundraiser and HOSA’s Wooden Roses fundraiser.

“I know that food fundraisers are popular here, so we’re planning on doing a fundraiser where we’re selling food during lunches,” SHFAA Vice President junior Tyrah Lamay said. “We don’t know any places we could partner with yet, though. I also know we’ve been thinking of doing a couple of seasonal and holiday fundraisers, like selling candy grams during February for Valentine’s Day.”

For now, the board of SHFAA will continue to plan ahead for the rest of the school year while using their first general meetings to gauge interest from other students.

“Our first couple of meetings are gonna be focused on letting members know what SHFAA is actually about and letting them know about the type of things that we want to do throughout the year,” Chae said. “Nothing too serious yet, but I’m still pretty excited.”