
Animal Friends ‘We Won’
StreetVet were overwhelmed to be awarded the Animal Friend’s £100k charity giveaway. As a small charity, funding like this will have an immense impact on our organisation and the work we do. From the very start StreetVet has been inundated with messages from cities where our services are desperately needed.
Co- founders Jade and Sam have always envisaged that StreetVet would expand across the UK to cover as many areas as possible where dogs and their homeless owners find accessing veterinary care challenging and often prohibitive. Since receiving the prize fund, we have already expanded into four new cities. The initial cost of setting up a StreetVet city team is approximately £4,000.
This provides medicines, veterinary equipment, insurance and uniforms so that our volunteers are easily recognised by our clients on the streets. We also provide a 24 hour helpline for our clients and are legally obliged to fund veterinary medicine inspections for each city.
The presence of StreetVet in a city has a huge positive impact on the pets we see and the emotional wellbeing of their owners. As you can imagine, ongoing costs of vaccines, wormers, flea treatments and medicines for chronic conditions mount up. Additionally, our patients may require emergency treatment, surgery or more specialist veterinary care which we contribute towards as necessary. Many of our volunteers give up several hours each week in order to keep our service running, but we found that Jade was spending every moment available doing essential work managing StreetVet alongside her regular vet job.
It became apparent that in order to make StreetVet sustainable, Jade needed to take on a permanent full time roll running the charity and enabling this has been a huge boost for the entire organisation. Her role involves recruiting and mentoring city leads and new volunteers, overseeing the legalities of running an RCVS registered veterinary practice including meetings with representatives across the veterinary industry, developing StreetVet protocols and manuals, connecting with other charitable organizations, representing StreetVet at conferences and educational events, securing further funding, liaising with the media to increase public awareness, arranging volunteer training and of course working as a StreetVet. Thanks to Animal Friends and all our supporters, we can now consolidate the framework set out by Jade and Sam, and continue to provide our crucial service to many more pets and owners in need.