Our Special Friends Joins Help2Fund

Nobody should have to give up their pet because life got hard. That single idea is more or less the whole of Our Special Friends, a grassroots charity in Suffolk and the newest organisation to join Help2Fund.

Who they are

Our Special Friends was started by a vet who kept noticing something her job description did not cover. People were bringing animals into the practice, and a good proportion of the time the animal was fine. It was the owner who was struggling, and the pet was the thing holding them together.

That observation became a charity. Our Special Friends works with people whose pet plays a central role in their mental health and wellbeing, but whose circumstances have put that bond at risk. The majority of the people they support are elderly. In practice they will work with any adult going through a period of crisis or vulnerability, and no two cases look quite the same.

What actually happens when someone calls

Someone is admitted to hospital, or to a mental health unit, and there is nobody to take the dog. Someone is leaving an abusive home and the refuge cannot take pets. Someone has been moved into temporary accommodation with a no-animals policy. In each of those situations the default outcome is that the animal is rehomed permanently, and the person loses the one relationship that was keeping them steady, at the exact moment they can least afford to.

Our Special Friends assesses each case and builds something around it. That usually means one or more of the following.

Foster care for the pet while the owner is in hospital, in a refuge, or between homes, with the explicit aim of reuniting the two once the crisis has passed. This is a loan, not a rehoming, and everyone involved understands that from the start.

Volunteer dog walking for owners whose mobility has gone. In a lot of cases the volunteer walks alongside the owner rather than instead of them, which means the person still gets out of the house and still has the walk, which was often the point of having a dog in the first place.

Contributions towards veterinary and non-veterinary care costs, for the situations where money is the only thing standing between someone and losing their animal.

Volunteer drivers to get people and their pets to appointments, in a rural county where a lot of people do not drive and the bus does not go where the vet is.

Why the reunion is the point

Plenty of animal charities do excellent rehoming work. Our Special Friends is deliberately doing something narrower and, in its way, harder. Their measure of success is not that the animal ends up somewhere safe. It is that the animal ends up back with the person it belongs to.

The reasoning is straightforward once you have seen it. A pet is not a luxury item when it is the reason someone gets out of bed, the reason they leave the house, and the only thing in the room that does not need explaining to. Losing it during a hospital stay turns a temporary problem into a permanent one, and the person who comes out of hospital is in a worse position than the one who went in.

Where your money goes

A £10 donation could provide a weekly visit from a volunteer and their visiting dog for someone who cannot keep a pet of their own.

A £20 donation contributes towards feeding a pet in temporary foster care.

A £50 donation goes towards veterinary care, or towards regular weekly dog walks for an owner who can no longer manage the walk themselves.

You can donate on their Help2Fund page: help2fund.org/donations/our-special-friends

Volunteering

Our Special Friends is heavily volunteer-run and could not do any of this without that. They need dog walkers, drivers, fosterers and event helpers, and they have a volunteer support manager who works directly with volunteers rather than leaving people to figure it out alone. If you are in Suffolk and have time rather than money to give, that is arguably the more useful of the two here.

More about the charity at ourspecialfriends.org

About Help2Fund

Help2Fund is a free platform that gives small registered charities in England and Wales promotional support and fundraising infrastructure they would otherwise have to pay for. It is run by a team of volunteers, and the support is personalised to each charity rather than sold as a fixed package: some partners want social media content, some want a donation page, some want help telling a story they have never had the time to write down. Nothing is ever published without the charity signing it off first. In-person volunteering sessions with our partner charities are planned for the future.

Our Special Friends exists so that a temporary crisis does not become a permanent loss. It is a small charity doing something very specific, very well, and we are glad to have them on the platform.