Parachutes for Pets Food Bank

The Cause

Parachutes for Pets is a Calgary Charity that assists Calgary's most vulnerable with essential pet care. We offer a pet food bank, vaccine and wellness vet clinics. Before COVID 19 we were undertaking the initiative of opening a pet friendly shelter in Calgary. There are currently no pet friendly community shelters in Calgary. However, once COVID 19 hit our pet food bank became our sole focus. Between March 12 and July 30 we have handed out over 1000 pet hampers to struggling Calgarians.

We are a resource for the Calgary Food Bank, The Alpha House, The Mustard Seed, the Calgary Humane Society, the Veteran's Association Food Bank, and Homefront to name a few. We deliver all of our pet food hampers as the majority of our clientele are immunocompromised and isolated. Pets provide a very important social aspect for these individuals. For many of them they are their only source of companionship and provide great therapeutic benefits. COVID has provided very difficult for these individuals as many group therapy activities have been cancelled and any part time work that they had was eliminated in these economic times. The fear in their voice when they call looking for help is heartbreaking. They fear they may have to surrender their companion because they are struggling to feed themselves let alone their pets. We provide 30 days worth of pet food/littler/supplies for each hamper. We work with pet stores to get a reduced rate on these items, however, the requests have been steady and we anticipate a very busy fall/holiday season, We would like to continue our pet hamper program throughout these unsteady times and keep the family pet with their family and out of the shelter.

Who Will it Benefit?

The primary clientele of Parachutes for Pets is:

The homeless, Veterans, Seniors, Disabled individuals, and Domestic Violence Victims who have left their situation and taken the pet with them (statistics show when the pet is left it usually suffers a tragic fate).

However, we understand in these times there could be significant financial challenges once CERB ends. We are a referral source for many great Calgary agencies and we try to accommodate all referrals from these agencies.