Help Us Get the DOGS HOME - Romanian Rescue Appeal

Help Us Get the DOGS HOME

We have been really hard at work and thanking everybody for their generous support on our recent appeal. As we had promised, we have also taken some time to look at long-term solution that can improve the lives of our beautiful dogs and the charity to survive in these hard times, just so that we can continue to look after the 800 dogs in our care while they stay with us and before they travel to their rightful loving furever homes.

The reduction in donations combined with the increase in cost over the past 2 years has meant we would have had to fold and make some really hard decisions, but you helped us. You were there, once again, as an angel that can be seen and spoken to. You have donated, shared, written, spoken, and above all you cared. If one ever needed faith in humanity restored, your love and compassion has gone a long way to do that. A lot of out-of-the-box thinking has been going on together with looking at some numbers and hard facts. As per our previous posts and fundraisers, the cost of everything has skyrocketed in Romania: dog food, energy, vet bills, wages and materials.

So, we have come up with something which we believe gives us a chance to keep fighting and maintain all of our dogs safe and healthy for a long time. We think that by building 25 new kennels at the cost of £28,066 at our own shelter in Tecuci we will be able to move 50 dogs from other shelters where we pay foster fees that are much higher than our cost per dog per month. With your donations, we could achieve a reduction in costs of about 11% per year, in addition to the added benefit of caring for the dogs ourselves, having regular visits from our volunteers, getting better updates for our team and our wonderful sponsors, would help us rehome more dogs and ultimately get closer to having all of the dogs under one roof.

As we like to be extremely transparent, below are our numbers as per our recently audited accounts available on the Charity Commission’s website ( rra4u.com/ACCOUNTS ):

The fixed running costs directly allocated to the dogs care (hence excluding veterinary bills, building, depreciation, finance charges, administration, UK kennels, accountancy, insurance and transport) amount to £229,965.00 for the year, £19,163.75 per calendar month – an average of £23.95 per dog per month;
The cost per dog per month at the 3 shelters where we have dogs in foster are: £16.23 in Calarasi, £22.20 in Tecuci and £42.21 in Bucharest. We have 280 dogs in Calarasi, 160 in Tecuci and 50 in Bucharest;
Given the current number of staff and fixed costs at our own shelter, the Romanian Rescue Centre, we can afford to move dogs at an incremental cost of £14.22 per dog per month.

The largest benefit at the lowest upfront cost is therefore gained by building 25 kennels and moving the 50 dogs (pictures attached) away from the most expensive foster to our own shelter, which will result in an 11% saving on fixed costs which beats the current inflation rate, hence making not only practical but also economic sense. All we need is some help from you please, in order to raise the funds we need to flatten the land, install the drainage, pour the concrete floors, stack up the bricks, build tin roofs, and mount the gates. Based on the costs of building the same type of kennels in 2020 (when we moved our dogs from Brasov – pictures attached) and factoring in a doubling in the cost of materials, we expect to spend £28,066 to build the 25 kennels and save around £17,000 a year going forward.

So here we are. We are so very grateful for your continued support and we hope you can see from the work that has gone in preparing this that the whole team here are working on solutions to give the dogs the best possible conditions while they stay at our safe shelter in Romania while they wait to be adopted by their rightful families. We know there is a lot of stigma around adopting dogs from abroad, but we like to think that love knows no borders and these dogs deserve just as much love and care as any dog born in the UK. We would be really grateful for any help you can spare. Even £10 will make a difference and help us get these dogs home.

If you love dogs, have some time you can spend in Romania, enjoy some building and joining and wish to help with the building work, please consider visiting the shelter and helping our team literally lay the foundations for a better future for the dogs! You can submit your interest by filling in a form at rra4u.com/BUILD and our lovely admin team will be in touch to take things forward.

Please please please help us bring the dogs home, they need all of us.

£340 of £10,000 raised

Thank you for landing on this page, we appreciate any donation you can make. Building more kennels will helps us CARE FOR OUR DOGS and SAVE MONEY. As a Charity we appreciate any help towards these costs. Also, please do not forget to complete the Gift Aid form just below once you have donated so that we can claim an extra 25% on top of your donation from HMRC at no extra cost for you.