Today’s guest post comes to us from Krista Beucler, Marketing & Communications Intern at Community Cats Podcast.

Home 4 the Holidays is a campaign put on by the Helen Woodward Animal Center, along with their partner Blue Buffalo Pet Food. The campaign is a three-month adopt-a-thon that connects adopters looking for a pet during the holiday season with their local shelters. We know the holidays are a time when many people are looking for a pet, and Home 4 the Holidays’ goal is to encourage adopters to visit their local shelter, instead of buying a pet from a puppy or kitten mill.

Since 1999, the Home 4 the Holidays campaign has grown to include over 4,100 pet adoption agencies, facilities, and rescue groups, and operates in 23 countries. It has also become the largest pet adoption campaign with over 17 million animals saved. This year alone, over 900,000 animals have already found homes through the campaign.

The program is free for shelters to join and offers several contests to give shelters a chance to earn money for their organization, including an opportunity to win $25,000 for the most creative media campaigns that drive adoptions. The partnership with Blue Buffalo also supports nationwide media coverage of the Home 4 the Holidays campaign, taking some of the advertising pressure off shelters. Shelters can also raise money through the Home 4 the Holidays donation portal.

If you chose to adopt a pet over the holiday season, Home 4 the Holidays hopes you’ll share your story with their #IChoseToRescue contest. By sharing your story, you can win a year’s supply of Blue Buffalo pet food for your pet and $1,000 for the organization you rescued him from! You can enter the contest here—but hurry, the contest closes January 3, 2021.

Mike Arms, President and CEO of Helen Woodward Animal Center, hopes that the program can help shut down puppy and kitten mills, as well as backyard breeders, by educating the public and driving business toward adoption. There are still estimated to be about 10,000 puppy mills active in the United States and two million puppies that originated in a puppy mill are sold each year. There’s certainly a lot of work to be done, but Home 4 the Holidays is helping change the way the public approaches finding a pet. (For US residents, you can also follow this link to send a letter to your senator or representative, asking for them to pass the Puppy Protection Act, which aims to raise the standard of care for dogs in commercial breeding facilities.)

To get your organization involved, visit the Home 4 the Holidays website.

Originally from Colorado, Krista Beucler received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Virginia. She was the editor-in-chief for Issue 7.2 of the Rappahannock Review, the literary journal published by UMW. Krista’s creative work has been published in From Whispers to Roars literary magazine. She is spending COVID-19 at home with her cats.