Volunteer Opportunities at Bideawee
Bideawee volunteers are everywhere!
Adoption Centers
Volunteers make the difference in how we provide high-quality care to our Adoption Center animals.
Volunteers help our pets by walking dogs (while reinforcing our training practices along the way),
and by providing cats with crucial socialization time, which includes playing with the social cats in
the habitats and working with the shyer cats to help them get used to human contact.
In Westhampton, volunteers provide great comfort to our retired animals as well as the adoptable
ones, by walking the dogs and giving our cats greatly-appreciated human contact.
Events/Outreach
Volunteers help with many of the on- and offsite events in which Bideawee participates or hosts. Volunteers might bring dogs to offsite adoption events, or provide event and administrative staffing. Volunteers are the best ambassadors for Bideawee, and we are proud to have them represent us at these events!
Learning Center
Volunteers assist with our Learning Center programs by running workshops, providing support in our classes, and visiting schools to give Humane Education presentations. Our Learning Center programs are expanding, and the ways in which volunteers can participate will be expanding, too. Check back regularly for updates!
Bideawee's Pet Therapy Program
Our Pet Therapy volunteers and their companion animals bring love, comfort, and friendship regularly to 6,000 children and adults in 120 healthcare and special education facilities. Pet Therapy visits have a positive impact on the quality of life, by providing medical and emotional benefits such as lower blood pressure, stress relief, decreased feelings of loneliness and depression, increased responsiveness, and unconditional love and acceptance. Since pet therapy visits are in great demand, we are continually recruiting both new volunteers and new organizations to help.
All volunteers, two-legged and four-legged, undergo a thorough screening process. A successful animal candidate is well behaved, loves interacting with strangers (including children), and is not easily startled by sudden movements or noises. We require annual veterinary medical records to ensure that all animals are up-to-date on vaccinations.
For more information on Bideawee's Pet Therapy program, click here.
Reading to Dogs
Through Bideawee's Reading to Dogs program, volunteer Pet Therapy couples — one two-legged, the other four-legged — visit schools and libraries where children can read aloud to the volunteer pet therapy dogs and improve their literacy skills, build their self-esteem, and foster a love for reading.
Bideawee is currently expanding the Reading to Dogs program to more schools and libraries on Long Island and New York City! We are looking for volunteer pet pairs at all locations who can be available once a week.
Foster Program
Our Foster Care program helps place animals with temporary volunteer families so they can receive the special care they need before they can be adopted permanently into their forever homes.
From March to November, un-spayed outdoor female cats go into heat. A cat's gestation period is 62 days and can therefore result in just one cat having many litters in one year. Bideawee receives countless calls reporting orphaned or abandoned litters of kittens. If the kittens are still nursing, they need a foster family who can bottle-feed them regularly. Bideawee provides extensive training and all supplies for this much-needed foster care.
If your schedule does not allow bottle-feeding every four hours, we also have a foster socializing program for kittens. Kittens that are eating on their own and using a litter box, but who are too young to be spayed or neutered, benefit from living in a foster home. There, they are cared for, socialized, and given loving attention until they are 8 to 9 weeks of age. This reduces the amount of time the kitten spends in a cage at Bideawee, which allows us to take in more animals, and eases the kitten's transition into a forever adoptive home.
Adult dogs and cats who have been at Bideawee for an extended stay, are having trouble adapting to the stresses of kennel life, or have special needs are also available for fostering. Fostering provides a well-needed, loving home environment for these animals. It also provides the opportunity to learn more about an animal's behavior outside of the shelter environment, and around other dogs, cats, and children.
Bideawee makes a commitment to its volunteers by providing rewarding and meaningful volunteer opportunities that make a difference, no matter what volunteer job they are doing. Every volunteer project ultimately helps the animals in our care or people in our community.
“We make a living by what we do, but we make a life by what we give”
— Winston Churchill
What you should know before completing Bideawee’s Volunteer Application
