COVID-19: Pets at Home and SAFP to donate £700,000 to local pet rescue charities
Howard Lake | 24 March 2020 | News
Pets at Home and its charity Support Adoption For Pets are donating £700,000 to help animals in need by supporting rescue centres and animal charities across the UK which are facing financial hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Support Adoption For Pets, “the UK’s largest grant giving charity to animal welfare”, will make grants totalling £400,000 to local pet rescue centres which it has identified as being in need across the UK. This represents over 10% of the total grants it made last year to support rescues with costs such as vet bills, vehicles, equipment and building improvements.
Pets at Home will be donating a further £300,000, as part of its VIP Lifelines scheme, to over 750 animal charities across the UK. This scheme involves animal charity supporters earning ‘Lifelines’ when purchasing items in Pets at Home stores, which is then converted into vouchers for the charity’s branches and centres to spend in their local store.
Each charity within the scheme will receive an additional £400 on top of what their supporting VIP members have already raised for them, to be spent in-store on essential food products to help feed the animals in their care during this difficult time.
Support Adoption For Pets charity manager, Amy Angus, said: “In the past few days alone we’ve been inundated with reports of rescues closing, stopping re-homing and taking pets in, volunteers self-isolating and struggling to fundraise at this critical time, and it’s vital we offer support now more than ever.”
In 2006 Pets at Home established the charity Support Adoption For Pets. Since then it has helped more than 1,000 rehoming centres and animal welfare organisations across the UK. In addition to its fundraising, it also runs dedicated adoption centres in Pets at Home stores.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.