Make a Difference
Volunteer
**Children under the age of 18 must have a parent or guardian volunteer with them while at the shelter.
Volunteering is a rewarding way to give back to your community and help save precious lives. While our staff works very hard, they can't do it all. Here are just a few of the ways that you can help out at our shelter:
General Volunteer Shift: Help us complete essential tasks around the shelter such as laundry, dishes, prepping enrichment for animals, and other tasks. These tasks are important for providing every animal with a clean and comfortable space while controlling disease spread.
Office Assistance: Assist with tasks such as answering phones, helping with paperwork, and other duties around the office as needed. Volunteers in this role are incredibly important to our organization and to the community since they help us better serve our community in so many ways.
Photography and Social Media: Create content (including pictures, videos, bios and more) about our animals that helps get them adopted. Updated content on our animals that can be shared on adoption sites and social media is crucial to our mission.
Dog/Cat Socialization: Many animals come into the shelter nervous and afraid, but they can quickly come out of their shell with the help of patient staff and volunteers. Here is a link to a video about canine body language that can be helpful when working with canines in shelters. https://youtu.be/gFFto1XVtxI
Adoption Helpers: Help facilitate and process adoptions during off-site adoption events and during peak adoption times at MOAS. Having enough volunteers and staff members to assist with every adoption helps so many animals find their forever homes.
Transport Volunteers: MOAS works with many rescue organizations, both local and across the country, to save as many animals as possible and it requires lots of people to move animals to and from different organizations. Transport volunteers are essential to our mission and save countless lives!
Special Event Volunteers: Help with set-up, breakdown, and other roles during events including our monthly vaccine clinic, Bark and Wine, and additional fundraisers throughout the year.
Becoming an active MOAS Volunteer*
Submit the Volunteer Application
Read follow-up email from our Volunteer Coordinator
Complete the Virtual Volunteer Orientation and Assessment
Email our Volunteer Coordinator to schedule your beginner shifts
At the beginning of you will complete a beginner shift/orientation and all required paperwork. While working these shifts you will become familiar with our facilities, staff members, and other volunteers.
Continue attending training opportunities offered by MOAS to begin taking on additional volunteer roles if desired
*If you have a unique skill set or background working with animals and would like to donate your time and skills to MOAS that goes beyond the outlined volunteer roles, please contact our Volunteer Coordinator at coordinator@moaspets.com.
We can't wait to have you join our volunteer family!
Urgent Volunteer Needs:
We are currently looking for volunteers to help us with the following projects and tasks:
Photography of shelter animals.
Updating and creating posts for our social media accounts.
Writing short biographies, stories, and updates about shelter animals.
Writing articles for our e-newsletter The MOAS Muttropolitan.
Assisting with off site adoption events.
Help with fundraising and solicit donations.
Exercise and socialize our dogs.
We are putting together a team of dedicated volunteers to help us run our monthly low-cost vaccine clinics. No prior experience is necessary, but we do need individuals who are able to able to commit to generally being available on the third Sunday of each month from around 10/10:30am to 3:30pm at the shelter. Our vaccine clinics are fast-paced and great opportunities to make a real difference in our community as we see around 60 appointments (an average of 120 pets!) over the course of four hours.
To make sure that things run smoothly, we need volunteers to help by checking in vehicles as they arrive, directing people and their pets, getting weights on animals as they come in to the clinic, making sure people receive their paperwork, and generally keeping things organized. Some volunteers may assist in walking dogs or carrying animals into the clinic, but volunteers aren’t required to handle animals. No volunteers will hold animals during procedures, unless of course you’re a vet tech who’d like to help us out with the actual procedures. Volunteers should be prepared to be actively moving around the entire time and should wear clothing appropriate to the weather as volunteer activities are almost entirely outdoors. We hold our clinics rain or shine unless there is extreme weather. Lunch is provided for all volunteers during our lunch break at 12:30.
We are also specifically looking for a few organized, multi-taskers who thrive in these kinds of fast-paced environments and who may be interested in one day leading the volunteer team. Once our team is established, we are hoping to be able to expand our vaccine clinic services to surrounding areas using our mobile vaccine clinic. So if you’re interested in helping with those too, please let us know!
If you’re interested in joining our vaccine clinic team, please email Sherrie Hines at boardpresident@moaspets.com.
