In response to California wildfires Jan 10 2025

From Director, Dr. Gillian Penn

Jan 11, 2025

To our communities, at home and throughout the region,

Here we are in Colorado during “blue skies” time with a clear outlook, compared to our neighbors to the West, just around our little corner of the world in California, wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and lives. So many are waking to their worst nightmare, a home full of memories, lost in an instant with little to come back to and unclear where to start.

While for many, this is a time of crisis, loss, and fear, we hope those that are affected can find clarity, hope and courage, “... for courage is as contagious as fear,” (Susan Sontag).

As these communities face the devastating impacts of these disasters, our support (though remote) is as important as ever. We know many Coloradans want to help those individuals and animals affected, but right now in the midst of the crisis 1,000 miles away, how can we do that?

The Front Range vMRC has not yet received any request to support our colleagues in these areas. If you are interested in joining our team conversations on potential ways to support, please reach out: hello@frontrangevmrc.org.

We will keep the team updated if we receive any requests for boots on the ground assistance.

Please remember, as we, Front Range Veterinary Medical Reserve Corps (FRvMRC), are housed within the Colorado Medical Reserve Corps, we can only deploy volunteers that are registered through the CVM (Colorado Volunteer Mobilizer) and have completed their FEMA ICS 100 and 700 courses.

This would be a good time to check to make sure you have completed these tasks and have your own go bags prepared. See our Volunteer page for Get Starting Info.

For now we can offer remote support with the following:

Our partner Human Animal Bond Trust (HABT) holds a virtual pet loss support group every Thursday that is open and anyone is welcome to attend.

If you are looking for ways to help animals impacted by these fires, consider donating to one of the following organizations – all of which are working to provide immediate relief to individuals and animals affected by these disasters.

Importantly: do not self-deploy (do not show up uninvited), do not drop off unsolicited donations. Monetary donations are the most helpful at this time.

Pasadena Humane Animal Shelter

Link to youtube KCAL news story from Jan 10 on Pasadena Humane, monetary donations are needed

https://pasadenahumane.org/give/donate/

Pasadena Community Foundation

https://pasadenacf.org/donate/

Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Los Angeles (spcaLA)

https://spcala.com/

Los Angeles County Animal Care Foundation

https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/

Best Friends Animal Shelter

https://bestfriends.org/emergency-response/los-angeles-wildfires?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=one5c-newsletter

Closing thoughts

From Consolations:

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte on crisis and courage:

“Crisis is unavoidable. Every human life seems to be drawn eventually, as if by some unspoken parallel, some tidal flow or underground magnetic field, toward the raw, dynamic essentials of its existence, as if everything up to that point had been a preparation for a meeting, for a confrontation in an elemental form with our essential flaw, and with what an individual could until then, only receive stepped down, interpreted or diluted.

This experience … where the touchable rawness of life becomes part of the fabric of the everyday, and a robust luminous vulnerability, becomes shot through with the necessary, imminent and inevitable prospect of loss, has been described for centuries as the dark night of the soul: La noche oscura del alma…”

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.

Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.[…] On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside and only by looking back, does it look like courage.”

Dr. Gillian Penn | Director FRvMRC