Volunteer Opportunities at Bideawee
Bideawee volunteers are everywhere!
Adoption Centers
Volunteers are vital to providing high-quality care to our Adoption Center animals. They help out by walking dogs (reinforcing our training practices along the way) and by providing cats with crucial socialization time, playing with the more social cats in the cat habitats, and working with the more shy cats, helping them to get used to human contact.
In Westhampton, volunteers also spend time with the animals in our Retirement Home, walking the dogs and providing much-appreciated human contact to the cats.
Events/Outreach
Volunteers help with most onsite and offsite events Bideawee participates in or hosts. Opportunities include bringing dogs to offsite adoption events, staffing onsite and offsite events, and administrative help. Volunteers are the best ambassadors for Bideawee and we are proud to have them represent us at these events.
Learning Center
Volunteers help out with our Learning Center programs by running workshops, assisting with 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 regularly bring love, comfort, and companionship to 6,000 children and adults in 120 health care and special education facilities. Their visits have a positive impact on the quality of life, 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.
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 for 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 who are eating on their own and using a litter box, but who are too young to be spayed/neutered benefit from living in a foster home where they are cared for, socialized, and given loving attention until they are 8-9 weeks of age. This reduces the amount of time the kitten spends in a cage at Bideawee, allowing 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 much-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, around other dogs, cats, and children.
Celebrated authors celebrating pets
