Kim Carrier drove up to the donation entrance of a St. Paul food shelf this week in a car piled high with bags of dog food. Her unusual gift reflects her unusual mission: to create Minnesota's first network of pet food shelves.
"I sometimes work at a pet supply store, and people laid off would call and ask if there is any place to get free pet food," said Carrier, of Minneapolis.
"I Googled and never found anything," she said. "So I decided to try to do something myself, and then a lot of other people jumped on board."
Carrier launched the Pet Project in July. It's part of a fledgling movement nationally to make sure people don't have to choose between keeping food in the kitchen or Fido in the living room.
With more than 200,000 Minnesotans laid over the past year, plus the elderly and disabled on fixed incomes, the pool of Minnesotans who could benefit is enormous, said Carrier.
But to date, pet food donations have been limited to sporadic drives by charities, pet food stores or humane societies, said local humane societies.
"It's great that people do fundraisers a couple times a year, but your dog or cat needs to eat all year," said Carrier, who on this day dropped off 500 pounds of pet food at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center food shelf in St. Paul.
"I want to make pet food easy to find and have enough available every day, all day."
'That was all the food we had'
For unemployed Minnesotans such as Donna Johnson, the service is "a blessing." She was sitting in her car outside Hallie Q. Brown this week when she heard her grandson yell, "Grandma! They have dog food!"
Johnson and her Shih Tzu, Baby, made a beeline to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs, next to the loaves of bread, were prepackaged bags of dog food and some rawhide dog chews. Johnson, who had no pet food at home, breathed a sigh of relief.
"If I have to chew up my food and share it with Baby, I will," said Johnson. "It came down to that last night. I shared my burger with her. That was all the food we had."
Johnson received Baby as a gift after having a stroke several years ago -- a stroke that sparked a depression she couldn't shake. She said her frisky friend is "the best thing that happened to me."
Hallie Q. Brown is one of four food shelves that Carrier currently works with. The others are in Minneapolis: Groveland Food Shelf, Catholic Charities Branch 1 food shelf and the Senior Food Shelf.
This week the food shelves were well stocked, thanks to a donation of 1 ton of pet food from a store that had closed.
Unlikely organizer
Carrier, 36, is an unlikely founder of a pet food distribution network. A hairdresser by profession, she never ran a business or a nonprofit. But she's appalled that people have to give up their pets simply because they don't have the estimated $400 to $700 a year needed to provide food and medical care to a typical dog or cat.
Her project has quickly picked up speed. Volunteers stepped forward to design a website, prepare the organization's taxes, and register it as a nonprofit charity with the state.
Her occasional employer, Urbanimal pet store, agreed to be a drop-off point for donations. So did the three Bone Adventure pet supply stores, Minnehaha Animal Hospital in Minneapolis and PineRidge Pet Care in Andover, she said.
Meanwhile, volunteers in Excelsior and Shakopee called and offered to set up donation and distribution systems in their communities, she said.
Exactly how to get the food in the hands of needy folks was one of Carrier's first challenges. Rather than re-create the wheel, she decided to work with existing food shelves. The food bank that stocks about 950 Minnesota food shelves and free dining sites, Second Harvest Heartland, said that it occasionally gets pet food as part of broader donations and that the pet food flies off the shelf.
Carrier called four food shelves that she thought represented a diverse group of Minnesotans. Each quickly agreed to be part of the experiment, she said.
As Carrier told all this to staff at the Hallie Q. Brown Center food shelf this week, the center's executive director, Jonathan Palmer, listened intently. Then he said, "Maybe we can help."
Palmer said his organization could consider being the Pet Project's fiscal agent, which would allow donors to take tax deductions.
"It sounds like you're starting a movement," Palmer told Carrier.
Donations follow downturn
Nationally, the growth of pet food donations came in response to a boom in abandoned pets after the economic downturn, said Steve Zawistowski, executive vice president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He estimates that more than 1 million pets nationwide have been relinquished because owners can no longer afford them.
While the Animal Humane Society of Golden Valley says it has not seen an increase in pets relinquished in the Twin Cities, the problem is more acute outstate, said Tracie Jacobson, a spokesperson for the agency.
Cities such as Tampa, Fla., have pet food pantries inside their humane societies, Zawistowski said. In other cities, donations are organized by churches, homeless shelters and charities. But there's no place with a statewide distribution system for pet food, using local food shelves, he said.
"It makes an enormous amount of sense," Zawistowski said.
Carrier, meanwhile, is cranking up her public presence. Later this month, she'll be collecting donations at "Woofstock" in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis and hosting a fundraiser at the 501 Club in Minneapolis. She'll keep building her network of volunteers and donors.
"I just can't stop doing this," Carrier said. "I'm obsessed. This feels like it really matters."
Jean Hopfensperger • 612-673-4511
