Photo courtesy of Melissa Grega.
Next month, a local nonprofit will host an adoption event at Lucky Pup Dog Shop in Bishop Arts. However, the organization has been working to help pets in need for nearly a decade.
Founded in 2016 by Lisa Faulkner-Dunne, The DAWG Project has provided resources to save the lives of Dallas dogs through city, shelter and community collaboration.
“That was back when there were a lot of loose dogs that were roaming in Dallas and actually Antoinette Brown was a woman who was killed by a pack of loose dogs and so then the city started getting really serious about trying to do something about the loose dog problem and we were involved,” Faulkner-Dunne said.
She and other community volunteers began counting the number of dogs on the street and started rescue missions to get dogs into homes, whether permanent or temporary, to prevent other incidents. The organization also began collecting and distributing funding to prevent dogs from being released into the streets from loving homes that just couldn’t afford to keep them anymore.
“We were seeing that a lot of the dogs that were loose were dogs that people just said ‘I can’t afford to fix my fence,’ or ‘I can’t afford to get the dogs vetted,’” she said. “And also, people weren’t getting their dogs spayed and neutered, which is still a problem to this day of course and so then they’re just making more dogs, which way more dogs than we can get adopted. Then anybody can get adopted.”
The DAWG Project implements their mission through three programs: Foster DAWG, Adopt-A-DAWG and Lucky DAWG. Besides the two more common adoption and foster paths, the Luck DAWG initiative helps remove the barriers to basic pet care by helping provide creative solutions for under-served communities.
“We’ve helped pay for fencing. We’ve helped pay for vetting. We’ve helped pay for neuters, training and all the things that are barriers to people keeping their dog,” she said.
As a nonprofit, all the funding received goes straight into animal care and the organization is run strictly on a volunteer basis. Rather than a home base in one location, volunteers involved in The DAWG Project care for the animals through fostering them in their own homes, the largest and most dependable foster being right here in Oak Cliff.
“Fosters can live anywhere,” Faulkner-Dunne said. “We just want them to be close enough to wherever we’re doing adoption events, so they can bring them to the adoption events, and so we can get them to our vet.”
The DAWG Project is working toward hosting more fundraisers and increasing adoption events to once a month, with the next one taking place Saturday, Nov. 22 from noon to 3 p.m. at Lucky Pup.
Melissa Grega, a volunteer with The DAWG Project that focuses on outreach for the organization, has been leading the charge on those opportunities through collaboration with community partners
Grega said that Aaron Biggs of Lucky Pup has graciously agreed to try and host adoptions at the shop every quarter, along with offering a percentage of purchases that day at Lucky Pup going toward the nonprofit.
“This is an inaugural event in the Bishop Arts District and we just want to get the word out about our organization, especially if people see in (the) Oak Cliff Area, South Dallas, dogs that are running loose to give us a call so we can get them help and get them adopted out and take them in as fosters and everything like that,” Grega said.