Today we’d like to introduce you to Melanie Rathke.
Hi Melanie, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for sharing your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
2015, I started volunteering at my local municipal no-kill animal shelter in Taylor, TX. After several months of seeing the ridiculous lack of funding for medical care ($3,000 per year!) that was budgeted by the city and the enormous effort that the two shelter staff members and a handful of volunteers put into saving the lives of the animals there, I started asking questions as to why there were no “friends of” non-profit helping the shelter out. Every shelter that is no-kill has a supporting non-profit, no matter how big or small the shelter is. Animals were being adopted with only a spay/neuter voucher that most adopters conveniently forgot about. Then, they brought litters of kittens or puppies in within a few months. There were dog fights almost daily due to all the unaltered males and females. Animals were sitting with tumors and other injuries, heartworms, etc., that were having to wait for an adopter or rescue to get them treatment. I spoke with city staff and ran into a roadblock. So I started talking with the shelter supervisor, and with her blessing, I recruited a couple of other volunteers, and we decided to create a supporting non-profit ourselves.
We all knew the stray and abandoned animal situation in our area then, and it hasn’t changed much. Taylor is (not for long!) a rural farming town on the far end of Williamson County. We are surrounded by equally rural communities that don’t have animal shelters or their own animal control officers. They can utilize Williamson County Regional Shelter’s resources but they were (and still are) constantly over capacity. We also have Milam County, just 10 miles to our east, and they don’t have a county-run animal shelter; there are just two or three towns in that whole county that even have municipal shelters, and none of them are no-kill. When deciding what to call our non-profit, we considered all of that and decided to call ourselves something that wouldn’t just be attached to Taylor. We wanted to be able to offer help to those animals, too, and the humans helping them, if we could and if funds permitted. So that’s how we came up with Texas Critter Crusaders (TCC). Once we got TCC off the ground in April 2016 and received our 501(c)3 determination letter, we began raising funds to help vet shelter pets at the Taylor Animal Shelter. Spay/neuter, vaccines, microchipping, heartworm treatment, flea/tick/heartworm prevention, major surgeries, minor vet visits, you name it. We raised funds for it and got the shelter pets taken care of. Our funding comes from grants, corporate sponsors, and individual donations. We do not have any municipal funding and are entirely separate from the shelter. We are also 100% volunteer run to this day. Today, thanks to a lot of advocating and speaking at city council meetings begging for a higher medical budget for the shelter, we can concentrate our efforts on keeping pets out of the shelter through community spay/neuter vouchers, free microchipping events, rental pet deposit assistance, and medical needs that owners may not be able to afford that may cause them to surrender their pets to the shelter. We continue to provide all major medical services above and beyond spaying/neutering, vaccines, and microchips for shelter pets. Heartworm treatment, prevention, and major surgeries for broken bones and injuries are the most common requests for assistance at the shelter at this time.
In 2017, we began offering free microchips to citizens. We hold as many microchip and low-cost vaccine clinics as we can throughout the year and, to date, have chipped over 1,000 owned pets! In 2018, I ran into a lady who had been trapping feral cats in town over the years and taking them for TNR (trap, neuter, return) on her own with the help and a little bit of funding from another org in Round Rock. We got to talking, I took it to the board, and we discussed the need with the shelter director. After that conversation, it was eye-popping to learn how many feral cats there were (and still are) in Taylor and how their outcome usually was euthanasia. Feral cats cannot be cared for in a shelter. They are the equivalent of a wild animal like a raccoon, except they reproduce like rabbits! So, after deep diving into the rabbit hole (pun intended) of TNR, we decided to provide that service in the city limits of Taylor and recruited that lady to start a TNR committee and recruit volunteers for that program. To date, we’ve TNRd a little over 600 cats in Taylor. It would be much more than that if we had more resources for low-cost surgeries. Thanks to more and more citizens volunteering at the shelter and eventually volunteering with our org, we’ve been able to help so many shelter pets and owned pets over the years.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
When we first founded Texas Critter Crusaders, we had a massive outpouring of support from our local citizens. As the shelter has expanded and the primary medical needs have grown along with the population of Taylor, we have had a more challenging time raising all the funds needed for every shelter pet we help. With new people moving to town, it’s been more complicated to keep up with getting our image and mission out front and center. We have a large regional shelter (Williamson County Regional Shelter) that many new Taylorites assume we are a part of and, therefore, don’t donate their funds locally to help the animals in Taylor. We have a lot of old Taylorites who had terrible experiences in years past, and they need to realize new people are running the shelter and a separate non-profit that helps them save more lives. Thankfully, we always seem to make ends meet, and we have a lot of excellent veterinarian partners who understand we may not be able to pay right away but who are just as passionate about helping the shelter pets as we are. Recruiting new volunteers has always been an issue. Many people think that once they see those animals in the shelter, they’ll want to take them all home. But, it is easy to leave them there when you know most of them are getting better care and more love there than they did before going into the shelter.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My day job is as Office Manager of a construction company, but my passion and uncompensated second job is running Texas Critter Crusaders! Recruiting other board members who were as passionate and willing to sacrifice much of their off-time for the org was a challenge. We were a 5 member board working our day jobs all week, then spending our weekends at the shelter and doing offsite adoption events, fundraisers, and other events to get our name and mission out there to the public. Recently, the Taylor Animal Shelter has undergone a complete remodel, and it’s been interesting to see the difference in community support when the physical appearance of the shelter is so much better. As the only animal welfare non-profit organization in Taylor, we’ve become pretty well known by many other non-profits in town, and we’ve all got this partnership where we know where to send who for what. We all help support each other’s events by participating and promoting them when possible. We’ve recruited new board members and expanded the board to 7 members. We have several committees that help us plan and implement fundraising events, some of our services to the community, etc. After 7 years of taking my small dream of supporting a non-profit for our local shelter and making it a reality, I can now take a breath and let others take the lead on the services they are passionate about. It has been amazing to experience. I cannot wait to see where our team takes it from here!
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I am not a risk taker! I’m always the first in our group to talk us out of doing some crazy big fundraiser. Mainly because when I think about how much it costs to put on a huge fundraiser, I start thinking about how many animals that money could help instead. And I’m a worrier, so I worry that we won’t raise more funds than we invest. Thankfully, I’ve got other board members who veto my vote and then put in the work to make it a success.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.
texascrittercrusaders.com - Instagram: instagram.com/
txcrittercrusaders - Facebook: facebook.com/
txcrittercrusaders
