Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity

Narratives: creating narratives that feature bipoc stories to combat stereotypes and share real life human animal bonding amongst people of color. This is conducted through film that produces public service announcements, short stories, documentaries and a full-length feature. Our narratives are true stories, interviews or based off our research. While we create care centers and document care's growth, we will create a library of media that will reshape the mostly white narrative in the animal welfare industry. Care centers: because care knows proximate leaders are subject matter experts on the challenges facing their communities, care is assisting these community leaders with the long-awaited support they need through grants, legal assistance and augmentation of skills. The care center model will not always include a building. Some will need access to care via transport services. Other organizations will focus on community awareness of issues related to animal care and control, spay & neuter, puppy mills and adoption. and some organizations will deliver services from within a building. Care will be there to provide start up assistance for an organization to grow through and including grants for supplies, vehicles or buildings. Care will also provide assistance with legal fees, marketing tools and fundraising. Every center should and will look different based off the community needs. Training: care has partnered with harvard's project implicit to study implicit bias, and has created a training that involves critical conversations, education and exercises to provide solutions for animal welfare to mitigate their biases and include more people to the save more Animals. Through individual zoom talks and workshops, including private conversation with leadership and surveys of full staff shelters and rescues, we were able to curate training sessions. After the first year, we are pivoting to make this more affordable and easily accessible with an online learning platform. We are creating a certification program that has 3 levels, involving history, real world examples, graphics and brief videos so the field can access and learn at their own pace. This is sold to organizations and is also being sponsored through large grants to larger adoption websites. Research: conducting research to mitigate bias and recruit more bipoc leaders in the animal welfare industry. Partnering with educational institutions (harvard and ut) to conduct research and collect data on implicit bias to assist with curriculum development for dei training and narratives. Creating surveys to identify barriers in pet adoption and help create practices and policies to become more open and inclusive. All in an effort save more lives.