Yet again it has been a busy few months for RCVC. Our team has been working behind the scenes to secure a new permanent home for RCVC at 4 Midland Hwy, Castlemaine. We are very excited to have been able to purchase this property with the support of government, philanthropic and community groups, local business and individual community members. The property has huge potential for RCVC to run desexing programmes, pop up health clinics and be the headquarters for our outreach service. Currently we are working with designers and builders to renovate the existing building into a purpose built veterinary clinic.
In addition to this we have run our inaugural dog desexing day in Castlemaine, provided a pop health clinic for dogs and cats, and, in conjunction with BAWCS at Huntly conducted a cat desexing clinic to help neuter 13 farm cats.
Our outreach service has been active doing what it does best, assist members of the community take care of their animals. Again, a huge thank you to our volunteers, who readily give up their weekends to help with the clinics and weekdays in outreach activities.
– Dr Yvette Berkeley
Co-Founder & Chair of Regional Community Vet Clinic
It’s been a few months since I joined RCVC as the Secretary. I feel very privileged to be part of an organization that is so dedicated to the community and its animals. I have worked in Animal Welfare for the last 7 years and to be part of the team that is so focused and dedicated to making a positive impact is inspiring. With so many exciting challenges ahead, I am looking forward to the upcoming projects and contributing to our goals. Together, we can make a significant impact with this unique project for regional Victorians.
– Khiara Jenkinson
Secretary of Regional Community Vet Clinic
We have done it!
As Yvette mentioned we have secured a property, and settlement took place on Thursday 3rd October, RCVC are now the owners of 4 Midland Highway Castlemaine.
We now embark on the renovation of the property to convert it to a veterinary clinic for the disadvantaged pet owners of Central Victorian. It’s been a long journey to arrive at this point and we still have much to do, we are continuing to apply for grants and philanthropic funding to cover the ever-increasing costs of the renovation. If anyone can help with materials, fixtures or financial donations we would love to hear from you.
We aim to create a facility that the entire community can be enormously proud of.
While we work on all our other projects, the outreach program continues to offer support and comfort to older residents in the community, the outreach service is never the same for any one recipient, we tailor the needs of the individual and their companion animal to a volunteer that aligns with their needs.
We have unfortunately had three of our outreach clients needing to enter aged care in the last couple of months, and we have been able to assist with that transition, by assisting with re-homing of their beloved pets, for clients without family this assistance is invaluable.
Our pop-up clinics have been busy with cat de-sexing and our first dog de-sexing day. We have de-sexed 56 cats and 6 dogs since our last newsletter. We have also conducted a health check clinic that saw 14 patients, 3 who needed follow up surgical appointments, which we helped facilitate through local vet clinics.
To round the year off, we will be back in Maryborough at the end of October and in Romsey at the end of November to run cat de-sexing clinics.
People donate in many ways, and we would like to acknowledge the people who have committed to a regular monthly donation, these regular donations allow us some predictability around the funds we have to be able to help in the community.
We have also recently registered for the Container recycling scheme, and you can now nominate Regional Community Vet Clinic quoting ID:C2000019668 when returning your containers to local drop points. This is a way to assist both the environment and RCVC in one action. Our local drop points are Chewton Service Station and Maldon Timber and Hardware.
The Castlemaine open gardens is on again this year and RCVC are delighted to announce that Catherine and Neil Tait will be donating the proceeds from their open garden “Stringy Bark Hill’ to RCVC, please take this opportunity to not only visit a lovely garden and Catherines studio, but to also help RCVC, the garden allows dogs to visit and our dog treats supplied by Fair Dinkum Dogs will be available at the open garden, so bring an extra $5 and treat your dog!