By Perley-Ann Friedman | Global Giving Project Manager
A little over a year ago, Lanta Animal Welfare was forced to close its doors because of Covid-19. Those doors remain shut. Please watch the attached video. It contains a personal message from our founder, Junie Kovacs.
Lanta Animal Welfare closed its doors to visitors back in March 2020 due to Covid-19, and those doors remain closed today. While this doesn't impact our ability to rescue and care for animals in distress, nor our sterilization initiatives, it does mean we had to reorganize ourselves. This reorganization resulted in some major changes.
Filling the gap of no volunteers
When we closed our doors, Thailand also closed its border. It's one thing to not allow tourists to enter the country, but this also prevented volunteers from arriving. We operate our centre with a small management and supervisory staff of five to oversee upwards of 25 volunteers. These people come to us from all over the planet to help us with animal care, cleaning, socialization and other activities. When the borders closed, our volunteers were encouraged by their home countries to return. We had a mass exodus of volunteers.
We reached out to the local community for help. We needed people to come to help us each day with the animals, and we needed people to foster them. We tried to foster out as many as possible to reduce the workload each day. This worked well but, over time, with so many animals abandoned and needing our medical services, we couldn't reduce the animals enough.
Our management staff are now doing the volunteer work packages, including our Founder, our General Manager and our communications and adoption managers. Even I am helping with the cat work packages each week. We all decided at the onset of the pandemic that no animal will go without, and we've worked hard to ensure this continues.
We are all looking forward to the day when volunteers from around the world will once again arrive at our door, but until that day comes, we're all focused on the animals. We know we’ll be able to get there and that animal care has not been compromised by the pandemic.
No visitors means no on-site donations
When we first heard that we had to close our doors and that no tourists would be allowed into Thailand we were very afraid. During the winter high tourist season in Thailand, tens of thousands of visitors come visit our centre, take a tour, buy our Swag, adopt our rescue animals, and leave a donation. This was all negated back in March 2020.
Instead of panicking, and stressing ourselves out, we looked at it as an opportunity to explore new revenue streams, new ways to adopt animals, and how we could sell our Swag online. We all worked together to figure this out and while we haven't been able to bring in the donations we used to from our visitors, we are, with some success, finding new ways to promote Lanta Animal Welfare.
We are sending out more newsletters to our mailing list encouraging online donations. These newsletters are full of stories of our animal rescues to keep our supporters up to date with the activities at our centre. We're posting a wider variety of stories on our social media accounts, and have started using video a lot more in our posts. We're also working hard to build our database so we can reach more animal lovers with our stories.
The results of our new outreach initiatives have been very good and we are pleased that our supporters have grown substantially this past year. We all feel that this situation has been a wake-up call. Before we relied too much on our visitors for donations. Now we know that we always need alternatives in place in case something changes. We are now better prepared for the future as change is inevitable.
Thai National staff in both the clinic and in the centre
A positive result of the border closures is that we've been able to hire Thai nationals in key positions. Previously we tried to recruit Thais, but it was difficult as we are not able to offer a good salary, especially for vets and vet nurses. As a charity we can't afford the salaries that vets in private clinics receive, even upon graduation. The same with vet nurses. As well, Koh Lanta is a very remote island so many Thais don't want to live here. Many Thai vets, vet nurses, and people interested in animal care looked for work in other countries. Now they are looking within Thailand.
This has been a tremendous bonus for us, especially in our clinic. The new Thai staff can communicate more easily with the locals to understand how the animal got injured. It has also helped our mobile clinics as most are in remote areas where English is not spoken.
We have seen the positive impact of our new staff members as we're better able to provide our rescue services to more animals in very remote areas.
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Junie Kovacs, our Founder, and I want to thank you all so very much for supporting this project on GlobalGiving. It allows us to do our important animal rescue and sterilization work here in southern Thailand. Your donation has saved countless of unwanted lives, prevented so much suffering, and helped us grow our rescue and sterilization footprint in areas that had never had veterinary care. Without such care the locals were unable to help suffering animals and they had no humane way to control the animal overpopulation.
Please stay safe for a bit longer, there is light at the end of this long tunnel.
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By Dr. Perley-Ann Friedman | Global Giving Project Manager
By Perley-Ann Friedman | Global Giving Project Manager and Financial Adviso
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