A Sponsorship and Donation Marathon to Make the PawzUp Center a Reality

Everything we have achieved at ROLDA so far has been made possible by other people like us. Without any form of government support, we rely solely on donations, grants, and sponsorships, and we always do our best to make the most of the money we receive. 

It all started almost 20 years ago when Dana, the founder of ROLDA, took in strays and cared for them in her apartment. Little by little, more people joined in and helped, and many dogs were saved. Fast forward, Dana’s best efforts and those of the entire ROLDA team have led to the construction of two shelters in Galati County, funded exclusively from donations, run by the organization, and performing nothing short of a miracle in changing the lives of stray animals in the region. 

We intend to continue doing this in the foreseeable future, especially since we have earned our fundraising and money-management stripes. We have proven to ourselves and, most importantly, to our recurring sponsors that we can increase the value of every donated dollar and put it to amazing work for the animals in our care. Therefore, at this point, doing something that may seem challenging for others feels like the norm at ROLDA. 

So, how do we keep up the adrenaline levels and use our grit and creativity to raise money for stray animals? We give ourselves a challenge this time. Not only should we build a center that can take in and house more dogs, but it should also be complete, with everything our dogs need to make a full recovery and significantly increase their chances of getting adopted. 

Creating HYPERLINK “https://pawzup.org/” the  HYPERLINK “https://pawzup.org/”PawzUp HYPERLINK “https://pawzup.org/” center is the epitome of our effort to help abandoned animals. It is where we put all the knowledge and experience we have gathered in all our years raising money and running the first shelters. At this center, we will have everything we ever needed and had to outsource. 

While we appreciate the partners who have always come to our aid, each case that required anything other than what we already had to offer our shelter residents meant extra time, resources, and effort to find solutions. With the center’s construction, the time and energy spent on finding outside solutions will be oriented toward helping more animals. And the thought fills us with joy and excitement. 

This brings us to the point where we remind our community of supporters that we still operate on donations. We have used all possible fundraising methods in our almost twenty years of activity. Even the campaigns that collected tiny sums of money from donors have brought in what we needed to help our residents through the winter, for example. 

But the construction from scratch of a center that is larger than our two shelters, one that will be able to host more animals of different sizes and species, one that will have isolation units and a recovery center for the animals undergoing medical treatment, one with its own veterinary clinic, park, and visitor center, will need contributions at a different level. 

One pressing reason we need to expedite the construction of PawzUp

When we came up with the plans for PawzUp and started working on the early phases of the construction, we thought we would at least have the luxury of doing this in our own time. Unfortunately, things have taken an unpleasant turn, and we see ourselves pressed by exterior factors to expedite construction. 

In brief, since the local authorities have not done anything to help with the situation of stray animals in Galati County, they are also oblivious that our organization has been picking up their slack and doing everything to benefit the community they claim to represent. Therefore, when the time came for them to sign off on a road construction project that would pass right through our existing shelters, they did not hesitate. 

Everything about our construction is legal. We had all the documents and the rightful claim to the land we had built on. Unfortunately, since they have so little respect for our activity, despite our legal efforts, nothing could be done to make them change the road construction plans. 

Under these circumstances, we see ourselves forced to expedite the construction because our current residents risk ending up back on the streets if we don’t. This means 700 dogs we have saved, cared for, given medical assistance to, fed, and sheltered might soon be left without a roof over their heads. 

In other words, the complex we wanted to build, which we planned to use as a safety net for the future of animals in our part of the country, is becoming our number one relocation option. This is why the PawzUp Center is slowly becoming more necessary than a dream.