Selflessness isn’t about doing one big, impressive thing. It’s choosing to show up when nobody will see it, when nobody will thank you, and when it would be easier not to. It’s continuing to care when you’re tired, frustrated, or even having one of the hardest days of your life. That has become the core of who I am through animal welfare. I’ve fostered more than 30 dogs through my local municipal shelter, many with behavioral or individual needs that made life in a kennel especially difficult. Outside of my constant fosters, I’ve taken dogs on weekend foster field trips so they could decompress and remember how to just be a dog again. I’ve stayed after hours to medicate animals when there was no overnight staff because they still needed someone there. Most of the time, nobody ever sees those things. I’ve taken that same mindset into larger projects, too. I planned an entire fundraising gala almost completely alone, without any appreciation or support from the nonprofit I served. I kept going because the animals mattered more than recognition ever could. Whether I was spending months earning the trust of a scared dog or spending sleepless nights planning an event, the reason was always the same: something needed me to care. Fostering dogs with specialized needs has taught me just how much that can matter. Some are scared, shut down, reactive, or overwhelmed. Some take weeks or months to trust you. They need someone willing to see past the stress and high energy, someone who can carry their fears like they’re their own and give them the chance to be themselves again. That belief is why I’m pursuing a degree in General Studies with a focus on Animal Services at Southern Utah University. I want to build a career within municipal shelter systems and expand access to behavioral support, intervention, foster programs, education, and other resources that can help animals before their struggles become a crisis. I’ve had some of the hardest days of my life while doing this work. I’ve been exhausted, frustrated, and unappreciated. I’ve lost animals I loved. And I still showed up. There was still a dog who needed to go outside. An animal who needed medication. A scared dog who needed someone to sit with them. A cat hit by a vehicle who needed emergency surgery funding. That’s real selflessness: choosing to care over and over again. Even when nobody is watching. Even when it’s physically and emotionally exhausting. Even when it would be “easier” to stop caring.

For a long time, I didn’t have any plan for my future. I was lost and honestly, fully convinced I couldn’t better my life. I wasn’t thinking about college or building a career. I was just trying to get through life without making it worse. Then I found animal welfare. For the first time, I found something I was passionate about. What started with fostering dogs through my local municipal shelter became something I couldn’t stop thinking about. I wanted to understand them. After fostering more than 30 dogs with individualized needs, I realized I didn’t just want to help these animals when they came through my door. I wanted to spend my life making it possible for more animals to get the support they desperately need. That passion became so deeply ingrained in who I am that I stopped caring if it “wasn’t possible” to better myself. I started to grow. I stopped second-guessing whether I was capable of changing my life and started actually doing it. In October, I begin my bachelor’s degree in General Studies with a focus on Animal Services at Southern Utah University. I’m continuing to work full-time while pursuing my degree, and I plan to build a career within municipal shelter systems. I want to empower shelters with greater access to behavioral support, intervention, foster programs, education, and the resources needed to give individual animals a real chance to succeed. I’ve seen what can happen when an animal gets the right environment, training, enrichment, and intervention at the right time. I’ve seen how difficult it can be for small municipal shelters to access those things. I want to lead that change. I want a shelter to finally be able to say, “This animal needs more help,” and have real resources within reach before that struggle has a chance to become a crisis. Getting here means more to me than simply earning a degree. I’m 25, I live on my own, work full-time, and am responsible for myself and the animals in my care. I grew up in a low-income, single-parent household, and I’m the first person in my immediate family to pursue a college degree. College was never something I saw as an obvious part of my future. For a long time, I didn’t even believe I had a future worth planning for. Now I do. I’m figuring out college largely as I go, while paying my own expenses and continuing to work toward the life I’m building. This scholarship would help make that future possible. A scholarship wouldn’t just change my life. It would change the lives of countless animals who made my life worth fighting for again.

Animals have always been a huge part of my life, but fostering is what turned that love into something I want to build my future around. My passion in welfare has grown far beyond simply wanting animals to be safe and loved. Through fostering and volunteering in a municipal shelter, I’ve seen how complicated animal welfare and sheltering truly is. Animals arrive with completely different and often unknown histories, temperaments, medical needs, and behavioral challenges, while the people caring for them are working within real limitations of time, money, space, and resources. Especially within small municipalities, those limitations can make finding the right solution for an animal incredibly difficult. That experience has made me especially passionate about animals who need the right foster environment to decompress prior to adoption. From specialized training and socialization plans to simply understanding what is triggering a reaction and learning how to work through it, I’ve fallen in love with every aspect. I’ve fostered more than 30 dogs, and the dogs who stay in my heart are rarely the “easy ones.” They are the fearful dogs who need weeks before they feel safe enough to trust again. The overwhelmed dogs who behave completely differently outside the shelter environment. The dogs whose shelter stress can make finding an adopter or foster much harder. They are the dogs who make you realize how much more there is to animal welfare than simply finding them a home. That’s the kind of work I dream of dedicating the rest of my life to. I’m beginning my bachelor’s degree in General Studies with a focus on Animal Services in October 2026. My goal is to build a career supporting municipal shelters, particularly through behavioral support, intervention, enrichment, foster programs, and access to resources across the nation. I want to work alongside the people already doing this work and help expand what is possible for the animals in their care. I want to build a future where a behavioral concern does not have to become a crisis before someone can get help. Where a shelter can say, “This animal needs more support,” and actually have somewhere to turn. Where fosters and adopters don’t have to figure everything out alone. Where intervention can happen early enough to change the outcome for decades to come. I want to spend my career helping make those chances possible for more animals, more shelters, and more communities across the country.

Recovery means being alive long enough to become someone I never thought I would be. In my late teens and very early twenties, I was using heavily, mostly party drugs. I wasn’t thinking about my future. I wasn’t building a career or working toward anything. I was hurting people I loved and making choices that could have easily meant I wouldn’t be here today. Honestly, I didn’t think I would make it this far. Recovery changed that. It gave me time. Time to grow up. Time to figure out what actually matters to me. Time to care again. To care about the people I had hurt, the animals in the world, and eventually, myself. Somewhere along the way, I found fostering through my local municipal animal shelter, and the dogs I was supposed to be helping started changing me, too. Now I’m working full-time, starting my bachelor’s degree in General Studies with a focus on Animal Services, and spending my free time fostering and volunteering. I’ve fostered more than 30 dogs, and I’ve found a passion I never knew I was missing. I spent years making choices that made my future smaller and smaller. Recovery gave me the chance to make something of the future I never thought I’d have—and to become the person I never knew I could be.

I volunteer and foster with King William Regional Animal Shelter, a small municipal shelter in rural Virginia. I have fallen in love with animal sheltering, but the part of it that has pulled me in the most is animal behavior, especially behavioral dogs in municipal shelters. I want to understand what is underneath a behavior instead of accepting a label and moving on. A lot of that came from Stubbs, one of my foster dogs. Stubbs was deaf and fear reactive, and there is not much scarier for a fearful dog than a shelter. It took me two weeks just to be able to earn his trust enough to get him out of his kennel. Over time, I watched him change with patience, consistency, and more treats than I could count. I got to see how much more there was to him than the fear people could see at first. Stubbs became my best friend. Eventually, his behavioral needs became too big for the world around him. Losing him broke me. But it also made me want to learn more. Not because I think I failed him, and not because I blame anyone else. Stubbs was just the kind of dog who made you want to be better. He made me want to understand behavioral dogs more deeply and figure out how I could do better for dogs like him. My own background has shaped me, too. I grew up without much, and my parents were often absent. They weren’t there to care, so I learned how to instead. I learned to pay attention, be patient, and show up for whoever or whatever needed someone to show up. Those are things I carry with me into the shelter and into the way I work with animals. I don’t have my entire future mapped out. I know I want it to involve municipal animal sheltering, and I know I want to keep learning about animal behavior, sheltering, and welfare. I want to educate myself enough to work within municipal shelters and create positive, lasting change for the animals and the communities they serve. This degree is a step toward that. This field is deeply under-supported, and I want to be part of making it stronger and more sustainable. A scholarship would make it possible for me to pursue my education with less financial pressure and keep moving toward a career in the field I have come to care so deeply about.