Brew City Bully Club, Inc.: Build-A-Bear Youth Humane Education Grant Report

How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?

We bought bus ads to promote our Animal Allies program throughout Milwaukee County and out to Waukesha County (a suburb of Milwaukee). Animal Allies most often visits classrooms comprised of inner-city/at-risk youth who are not educated as to how to behave around animals or care for pets.

It reintroduced the program to teachers/schools that have had us visit in the past but had forgotten about this resource for their students. Typically, each classroom we visit has about 20 kids, and usually almost half of them have pets. Most know someone with a pet, and pretty much all of them come into contact with stray pets often. So educating these children on how to behave around and care for animals appropriately helps countless pets to have better-quality lives.

How many pets did this grant help?

At this time, that's hard to quantify because the visits that we've scheduled from these ads are in 2018.

Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.

Many of the children in the classrooms we visit have never heard of “rescue” and have no idea about the homeless-pet epidemic in our country. Many have no idea that they could grow up to be an animal rescuer, trainer or vet. You’d be surprised how many kids don’t even understand that pit bull-type dogs aren’t property and need care, just like the “pets” they have living in their homes. This particular grant didn’t help one of our adoptable pets directly, but helped the current pet population and future pet populations in general all throughout Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties.