On February 23, 2020 our Let's be S.M.A.R.T. team and dedicated volunteers organized, in collaboration with Love Without Borders For Refugees In Need NGO, an animal welfare educational event for children at one of the refugee camps near Athens.

 

The purpose of the event was to teach children about animals, how to love and respect them and to engage them through games, arts and fun activities in learning about our amazing animals. We had our S.M.A.R.T. Kids George and his sister Apostolia participating in the event as well; they came with their mom to share their knowledge and play with their new friends in the camp.

 

The event was organized in two parts. The educational session presented the children with our S.M.A.R.T. animated video series relating to important animal welfare topics (how to love and respect animals shown in the Series #1 video with George, the S.M.A.R.T. Kid superhero, in Series #2 to stress how important it is to adopt pets from the shelters and to not buy them, and in Series #3 and #4 how to care for adopted pets and how & why it is important to sterilize the stray and our own animals). The kids were provided with educational notebooks accompanying each video and they discussed with our Team what they learned about animals from our videos.

 

The activities session was designed for children to enjoy a whole range of animal related creative games and art making, such as creating the kitty hand prints, drawing, painting and creating animal masks. This super fun part was a total success not only among kids of all ages, including toddlers, but also the moms who took a part in the arts making as well!

 

Since there are a number of stray cats living in the camp and the surrounding areas, our Team taught the children how to approach safely and connect with the cats. The kids were also given some cat food and shown how to feed the kitties and how to pet them gently. One of our near future projects is to help the refugee community to get their local cats sterilized and to organize a cat feeding station in the camp.

 

Our big thank you goes to Kayra and Love Without Borders For Refugees In Need, the local refugee community for their warm hospitality, to all children who took part in our event and to our amazing volunteers and team who helped at the event!

 

Message from the Founder: “This event warmed the hearts of every one that participated and the smiles on all the faces were golden and will be memorable for a lifetime. Many times we believe we understand how others are living but until one witnesses the overall conditions and can put things into perspective, it is a great awakening. It keeps us motivated to spread our animal welfare education and activities to the children and to offer them some joy that goes along with the learning and to be able to interact with a community that one would not normally do so. We look forward to many more joint collaborations with Love Without Borders for Refugees” --- Julie Kelley