Welcome to Pack Pride! In honor of National Volunteer Week, we would like to introduce you to a volunteer who has been involved with us in a wide variety of ways for the past 17 years!
Kelly Kaelin is an unsung hero here at Texas Humane Heroes. She joined our ranks as a volunteer back in 2001 after she saw a news segment about us on TV. She came to our Leander Adoption Center to make a donation and hasn’t left since. Her extensive volunteer career with us started with cleaning the animal areas and soon after she got recruited to help with offsite adoptions. “Each day was always quite an adventure”, she said as she thought back to her weekends spent adopting out pups at PetSmart.
After a few years, she transitioned into doing our Pet of the Week local news segments. For 12 years, Kelly was on TV, advocating for TXHH dogs and cats. When her daughter was 5 years old, they started tag teaming the segment; introducing the dog and providing general animal tips and stories. Ironically, out of the hundreds of dogs she brought to highlight on the news, her and her family ended up adopting three of them. Her favorite aspects about volunteering with Texas Humane Heroes is shedding positive light on these loving pets and also seeing the fruition of her segments. Kelly loves seeing our pets go to their forever homes.
Now, Kelly is a powerhouse on our Grants Committee, and has been for the last few years. She relentlessly writes grants for Texas Humane Heroes to receive funds for certain projects and overall help the animals in our program. She enjoys the grant writing process and shares that it’s just as rewarding as her past volunteering experience in other departments because she gets to delve into another aspect of the organization.
When she’s not volunteering here, Kelly enjoys watching movies with her family, reading, and gardening. Her all-time favorite movie is The Princess Bride, and her current favorite show is Game of Thrones. Her favorite color is orange and favorite pizza topping is green peppers.
Our organization would not be the same without the thousands of hours that Kelly has spent volunteering. We can say with confidence that Texas Humane Heroes is better because of Kelly Kaelin.