Kyle: And then there’s a cat, a dog, a horse and a dolphin.

Sharon: Meow.

Kyle: All right. So yeah. Hey, everybody. This is Kyle Sasser and this is episode 28 of “Great Things Tampa Bay” and today we’re doing an interview with SOAR, which is a wonderful animal rescue organization here and you’ll learn all the details inside the interview. So be sure to stay tuned. And also we have an event coming up here in the Tampa Bay Area called Give Day Tampa Bay. And lots of great charities of which SOAR is a part. We’ll be taking part in a Give Day so be sure to give it a listen so you can find out how to contribute and we’ll also be putting information in the show notes as well so feel free to check there as well. So anyway, without further ado…

Hey, everybody. This is Kyle Sasser and I’m here with Steven Bennett and Sharon Donnelly of SOAR, which is the Sun Coast Organized Animal Relief Organization and they’re a nonprofit organization located here in Tampa Bay and we’ll get to exactly what they do in a little bit but they help out a lot of furry folks. Just to give them a little bit of an introduction here. Steven has spent 25 years in local rescue efforts. Steven also used to own Top Dog Grooming, Boarding and Photography where he would take professional photos of pups and kittens and I’m sure other strange and wonderful beasts.

Steven: Yes.

Kyle: And he’s currently the SOAR CEO, or is that right or…?

Steven: CEO, right, executive director of SOAR.

Kyle: All right, there we go, executive director of SOAR. And then Sharon Donnelly, she is currently a teacher at Plato…

Sharon: Academy.

Steven: Plato Academy.

Sharon: In Saint Pete.

Kyle: And she teaches math and science there. Don’t ask her any English questions.

Sharon: No, because I’ll flub it up so…

Kyle: Yep. She also has been a part of some Susan B. Komen fundraisers and has spent 15 years involved in nonprofits in the area.

Sharon: Correct.

Kyle: And they both have very big hearts and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So without further ado, Steven and Sharon, if you could just give us a little bit information on SOAR, what the overall mission is and then we’ll get into the nuts and bolts here.

Steven: Sure. Well, thank you for having us here today, Kyle. SOAR, we’re very excited about. We’re about two-and-a-half years old, and as you said, it’s SOAR, Sun Coast Organized Animal Relief. We are a 501C3 nonprofit here in the Tampa Bay area. We cover the Sun Coast so we cover Pinellas County, Hillsborough County, Manatee, Sarasota, Bradenton, Ruskin, the beaches. So it’s a large area. Covers about four million people. So we’ve been mainly focusing on Saint Petersburg for our first couple of years. We are starting to branch out a little bit now and heading across the bay a little bit and up north of here. What we do is we…we’re a little different because we don’t take in the rescue animals like most of the organizations here. We actually are trying to be an umbrella organization. We are there for those that are on the front lines rescuing the animals: dogs, cats, feral animals, birds, horses. We are also here for our sea life, which is a big part of our organization, and that includes doing beach cleanups in the area and we have a lot of problems with pollution in our waters here so…

Kyle: That we do. That we do. So what sort of help do you specifically provide to some of the shelters and citizens here?

Sharon: So as a nonprofit we know that nonprofits can have a challenge with resources whether it’s volunteers, dollars, donations, so we’re here to support other nonprofits. There can be peaks and valleys. We wanna be able to make that more consistent for all the nonprofits so they can reach out to us and we can go ahead and provide what they might need or direct them to the sources that they might need as well.

Kyle: And such as…like what would be an example of…?

Sharon: Food. So if they’re running low on food. They’ve gotten additional adoptions in and they don’t have enough food to take in those 15 pit bulls, we’ll go ahead and donate the food. If they need additional resources we could do fundraising and go ahead and hook up I with what they might need for those resources.

Steven: We have helped out with medical bills, we’ve helped out with…and it’s not just organizations, it’s individuals in the Bay Area too. We’ve had a lot of people now that we’re getting our name out there have been contacting us, finding out about us. So we have several people who have…maybe war veterans. We have a cancer patient who has five rescue cats and cannot afford to take care of them, feed them and supply kitty litter, which is expensive. So we’ve been providing that free of charge to them.

The other thing a lot of people don’t realize in the Bay Area, you know…everybody knows the major rescue organizations. They see them but they aren’t aware…a lot of people aren’t aware that we have hundreds of smaller rescue organizations here that really fly by the seat of their pants. They are self-funded. They don’t have a location so the animals are all fostered among many, many people. So sometimes they’ll take in…we had a rescue recently we provided food for that took in 56 dogs I believe.

Kyle: So yeah. So we adopted our cats from Friends of Strays, which I always thought of as like a smaller place but probably it’s actually one of the larger ones compared to…

Steven: It used to be small. And they have grown in leaps and bounds. They’ve gotten the same with like, you know, Sun Coast Animal League. They have started out very small with one little room with a few cats in it and now they have major…some of the largest fundraisers in the area and they’ve taken a lot of animals.

Kyle: My wife still likes to just go there just to like see the cats that they have and I’m like, “No.”

Steven: I can’t do that. I can’t do that because they…

Kyle: I was like, “We don’t need another one.”

Steven: Somebody’s coming home with me if I go there.

Sharon: So what we have realized, there’s a lot of big hearts out there. Sometimes their pocketbook just can’t afford what they’re trying to do from their hearts.

Kyle: So basically your role is to fill the gaps, basically?

Sharon: Correct.

Steven: Right, and we knew that when you’re on the front lines and you’re taking in the rescue animals it’s a lot of work. It is an immense amount of work and it’s 24/7. We knew we could do more and wanted to do more by saying, “Let’s help all of these organizations. There’s so many that need help so let’s go that route and we can raise money for them for vet care.” We’re starting to meet with vets now and then trying to do some kind of partnering for lower vet bills for rescues. We’ve been providing a lot of food, thousands and thousands of pounds of food for different rescue organizations as well as our eventful hurricane season last year in 2017. We sent food to Houston, supplies and food. We sent food to South Florida. We did even send some money to Puerto Rico for their animals as well. Couple of years ago, West Virginia when they had the major flooding there, we filled a U-Haul, along with two other recues, we filled a U-Haul in a short amount of time and two young ladies drove it up to West Virginia for the animal shelters up there.

Kyle: So if you could take us through and tell us how you got started with SOAR, how you started it up.

Steven: SOAR came about…it kind of morphed out of a couple of disappointments, things that didn’t happen. I was…in 2004 I was working on a book for charity called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Furry.” It was a celebrity pet interview book and it’s as yet unfinished but through that book I came across and started working with a lot of rescue organizations out in L.A. and in New York and started seeing a lot of the more famous rescue organizations, the Hollywood Humane Society, Actors and Others for Animals, and from the proceeds of the book what I was going to do was open up a place called the Pawhouse Ranch and it would be for any kind of animal. It didn’t matter, would be able to go there whether it was horses, dogs.

I would focus a lot on elderly dogs that get taken to shelters and they’re put down because of their age. Nobody wants to adopt them. So it would be a place for them to go out and live the rest of their life and I liked that idea and I was hoping to start it in many other cities. And that was part of the dream. So again, when the economy fell apart, that got put on a back burner and then the years started going by and I started thinking how time consuming taking all the animals in is and how I’ve worked on the front line of rescue for a lot of years so I thought I wanna do more. I wanna do something on a bigger scale that will help a lot more animals. So from that it morphed into, “Let’s help all the organizations that are already there.”

Kyle: Yeah. Let’s help the helpers.

Steven: Yes, exactly.

Kyle: I like it.

Steven: Thus, the front line.

Kyle: I like it. Sharon, how did you get involved?

Sharon: Well, two things that are very close to me are kids and animals, and certainly when Steven approached me about SOAR I knew his passion for animals already. So I thought, wow, how can I get into this with the educational part and the awareness? I thought, well, I can get that message out there both for children and help animals as…I’ll say it. I said I’m math and science, right? Help animals as well. So that’s really how I got into it also.

Kyle: And where are you from originally?

Sharon: I’m from Canada. [inaudible 00:09:55] I can say “about,” “house,” and all that fun stuff if you want me to.

Steven: I have to interject and just say that several people were interested in coming on board and I had one person in mind right off the bat. It was Sharon because of her compassion with charities of all different kinds and with animals and I knew, you know, doing this, something on the scale that we’re doing, I needed to surround myself with really, really good people. So Sharon Donnelly and…

Sharon: He’s making me blush.

Steven: It’s all true and it’s all…I couldn’t have come this far. SOAR would not be here without her so…and another one is we just have been trying to get on board from the beginning is Sandra Moody Green who isn’t here today but she’s another board member and has been volunteering from day one and put a lot of heart, blood, sweat and tears into it. So I wanted to acknowledge her as well.

Kyle: Yeah. Good stuff, good stuff. All right. So what do you see SOAR…where do you all see SOAR going in the next five years?

Sharon: We have a big goal but one that we can accomplish with all your help.

Kyle: I like big goals. Let me hear it.

Sharon: Okay. Pet food bank in the Saint Pete area to start out with because as we know there’s a lot of folks that cannot help out their animals and our drive right now is fundraising or raising those resources so that we can have a pet food bank for those individuals that are down or out, or having those ups and they can help us out, or having those downs and they can come get food if necessary.

Steven: And it is a very large thing because people don’t realize a lot of these organizations like Meals on Wheels are wonderful organizations, and feeding for the veterans and the homeless, these people, a lot of them have animals, therapy dogs, just animals that are comforting to them that are really getting them through day to day. We know the power of animal companionship and a lot of these people are giving their food, part of their food to their animals because they can’t afford to feed them. They don’t wanna give them up to a shelter so they give them a part of their food.

So SOAR will also help to work with a lot of these organizations where we’ll provide food for them to take along with the food for the humans to take it with the animals as well but people will be able to come to our food bank, get supplies, the rescues will be able to come, individuals. And there’s a lot of…it’s not just food. There’s these rescue organizations. They need bleach and towels and kitty litter and things that people don’t think about every day. So we will hopefully be able to provide all of this and we’re very proud that we have not had to say no yet in two-and-a-half years. Everybody that’s come to us, we have found a way. If we didn’t have it, we got it so far. We hope to really expand on that big time.

Kyle: That’s great. I mean, that has to make you feel really good that, you know…it’s impressive. It’s impressive.

Steven: When they show up…

Sharon: I’m smiling big if you can’t tell.

Steven: When they show up and they…we meet up with them or get a meeting place especially if they’re coming from far away and we’ll show up with truckloads full of food and supplies or whatever and the tears flow on both sides. And they start crying. We’re like…I had a woman the other day that had a five-month-old pit bull in the back of her car and she has two cats as well and she had money stolen from her, had no money for the rest of the month. So that was her food money for the animals. So I showed up and SOAR gave her about a three, four-month supply of food for the dogs and the cats so she…the tear…and the dog jumped out of the front seat, came around to the back. And she said the dog doesn’t go to anybody, he had been abused, and came over and did start licking my hand and then jumped up in the back of her car where all the dog food was. It was just the tail wagging and just…and then she got all choked up and I’m sitting there getting all choked up. It happens almost every time.

Kyle: Very rewarding. I’m sure it’s like you’re just like, “Here we go again.” All right. So five years, food bank.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Steven: Well, that’s coming much sooner. We’re almost there. But we wanna open more than one. This one’s gonna be based in Saint Petersburg. We’re just probably a few thousand dollars away from being able to start scouting out a location. So we’re very close, which is why our fundraisers are incredibly important.

Kyle: Yeah. And listeners, don’t worry. We’re gonna get to the how you can help at the end of the episode so just stay tuned. I know a lot of you all are probably like, “How do I help out on this thing?” Just be patient. Just be patient.

Sharon: So start off with one location. Make sure that we can consistently provide for that one location and then spread out where the need is needed.

Kyle: Absolutely. Mastery of one and then expand.

Sharon: Correct.

Steven: We started out very slowly. The general impulse was to get out there and to go to all the media right off the bat and we held off. We didn’t wanna go and say, “This is what we wanna do.” We wanted to go and have some accomplishments under our belt. So we wanted to say, “We’ve done this.” And now we have done beach cleanups in the area, we have provided food for a lot of rescue organizations as well as individuals. We are working on programs to implement in the schools to teach children about the importance of educating them about animal abuse, about the littering and all the litter and garbage.

Sharon: Good ownership.

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah, proof of concept is very important. Very important. I know.

Steven: Exactly. And so we’re almost there with the pet food, our first one. So we’re incredibly excited about that and that’s…

Kyle: Yeah. Congratulations. Like definitely. Like it’s a big…

Steven: Thank you very much, Kyle.

Kyle: It’s a big, big undertaking. All right. So you all have gotten some praise with specifically your marketing efforts and specifically your logo.

Sharon: Yeah, isn’t my shirt awesome?

Kyle: It’s the…yeah, the logo…

Sharon: You can see my shirt [inaudible 00:15:39] logo.

Steven: People that see it love it. They want it. We will be having a…when the pet food bank and office open we will be having probably…we have T-shirts now available but we will be having caps and mugs and things that 100% of the proceeds will go…

Kyle: So who designed the logo?

Steven: Jeff Downs from 454 Design I believe is…he…

Kyle: Yeah, we’ll give him a little shout out. That’s good work.

Steven: He did an amazing job and he did it for practically nothing and it was a lot of work actually and we gave him an idea and he ran with it and did an amazing job, as you can see, and people love the logo. It stands out. We’ve had…

Sharon: It encompasses what we’re trying to do because it’s got a big heart covering all different types of animals.

Kyle: Yep. And looking at the logo, so it’s got the word SOAR and then there’s a heart with some feathers or…like some wings around it.

Sharon: Wings.

Steven: We also take care of birds. We are gonna be working with bird sanctuaries as…

Kyle: Yep. And then there’s a cat, a dog, a horse and a dolphin. So definitely thank you to…what was his name again?

Steven: Jeff Downs.

Kyle: Yeah. Definitely thank you to Jeff Downs. So you’re a few thousand dollars away from reaching your goal for the food bank.

Steven: Right.

Kyle: How can people help?

Steven: They can go to…there’s a big event coming up called Give Day Tampa Bay. It’ll be coming up very shortly. Early donating will start April 17th. May 1st is the big day. It will be…

Kyle: But it goes on all year long?

Sharon: All year.

Steven: You can donate all year long but they…last year, for instance, they raised $1.7 million in 24 hours.

Kyle: Wow, okay.

Steven: So it’s very impressive. And then that amount [inaudible 00:17:16] smaller amounts will come in but that one day you will see hundreds and hundreds of restaurants in the Bay Area participating, sponsoring these organizations so when you go on to giveday.org it will have different categories. So there’s many different categories from…ours will be listed under animals. So if you click on animals, then scroll to SOAR you’ll see the logo. It’ll be SOAR, Sun Coast Organized Animal Relief.

Sharon: There’s also a real quick way if you go on, on the search, you know, that great magnifying glass, just type in SOAR and it’ll take us right to that.

Steven: Right to that, yeah.

Kyle: And dear listeners, we’ll be putting a direct link in the show notes.

Sharon: Oh, even better.

Kyle: So take a look there. I’ll make it even easier for everybody.

Steven: We are getting the word out on social media, and this is our first year so we’re thrilled to be a part of it this year. We’ve been trying for a couple of years to get in and we are this year and it’s very heavily promoted in all media around Tampa Bay. I’d say it’s getting larger and larger every year so…

Kyle: It’s good stuff.

Steven: So this could bring us over the top for the money we need.

Kyle: So does somebody need to go and give a $1,000 or like what sort of donation…?

Steven: It’s a minimum $5 donation and then there’s…you can make a custom amount so any amount you want. You can do a monthly amount that you can have deducted every month. You can just do a one-time gift of, I think it says, $5, $25, $50, $75, $100, or custom and you can make it $5.

Sharon: So it’s cumulative, every bit helps. Cumulative from $5 to whatever you can…

Steven: We’re thrilled. And a side note there, there’s over $50,000 in prize money for things like creative organizations, what you do to raise the money, creative ways. We’re thinking about doing a kissing booth.

Sharon: Yeah. Kissing puppy booth.

Steven: Kissing puppy booth. And many other ways too as well but whoever has the most unique users, the most visitors, it doesn’t mean the most money, just the most users that go on so it could be tons of $5 givers and if we have the most then we could get a $5,000 prize on top of it additionally so…

Sharon: It would so help us out too. So it can help with so many things.

Kyle: So if you want to have the biggest impact on animals donate to the umbrella organization that helps all of the other organizations.

Steven: We would greatly appreciate it, and more importantly the animals greatly appreciate it. The need is great.

Kyle: All right. So before we head on out here, what one thing do you wish people would know or do regarding animals?

Sharon: All right. I’ll try not to stand on my soapbox too long, but…

Steven: Stand up, sister.

Sharon: Education and awareness. It’s very heartbreaking every time I see that somebody gives up an animal because they just didn’t do their homework…as a teacher, homework. And it just takes a few minutes to really understand what commitment it takes, what dedication to have this lifelong friend. So don’t give up on them. Research first, understand the commitment that is gonna take, and then you’ll have this beautiful friend for the rest of your life instead of giving one up. So that’s my pet peeve. Okay.

Steven: And I’m really onboard with that big time because it just drives me insane. But there’s so many different areas too. We didn’t really touch very much on the sea life, but we for the most part live on an island in Tampa Bay. A beautiful, beautiful island for the most part, and it’s beautiful waters, but we’re failing as a society. Our dolphins, our manatees, sea turtles, our fish are filled with cigarette butts and plastic bags and plastic straws and they’re dying in very large numbers. There’s a lot of pollution in the water and we need to do better and we can and we’ve been doing a lot of beach clean ups and we would love volunteers to join us to come out and join us on them. We do them every few months or so. We partner with Keep Pinellas Beautiful. Great organization as well, and they’ve shown us how to do it and we’ve…we’re doing it. So that’s…

Kyle: I love it. I love it. And that takes us to, you know, kind of our lead out here. So if somebody wants to help and they’re eager, eager to get out there, they’re eager to donate, they wanna help with the beach cleanup, what’s the best way for them to get in contact with you or to know when your next events are?

Sharon: So glad you asked that and there’s gonna be a link there too, www.flsoar.org. You can go ahead and check out our calendar of events where you can either volunteer or help us raise funds by participating or doing the beach cleanups but if you log on to our website then you can go ahead and check out where you can be the most effective for you and for us as well.

Steven: And if you do go on our Facebook page, the first time you go on it’s Sun Coast, two words, Organized Animal Relief and that will bring up our very cool logo and then you can follow us through there and we do many, many events every month, fun things from drag queen bingo, skating nights we’re gonna be having, painting with a twist, events at The Dog Bar in Saint Pete, all over. We just do a lot of fun…

Kyle: That’s a personal favorite of mine, Dog Bar.

Steven: Yes, The Dog Bar. We’ve all…

Sharon: And they’ve been wonderful for us.

Steven: And people can also call us at 727-318-2377 if they wanna ask us where to send a check, if they want to ask how they can help that particular week or month, what we have coming up. They can do that as well and we’ll be happy to speak with them and [inaudible 00:22:38].

Kyle: Perfect, perfect. So is there any particular help that you need that…like is there anything that you kinda always need?

Sharon: Always seems like cat food and cat litter.

Steven: Cat litter because there are so many cat…dogs seem to get the majority of attention, and cat litter’s expensive. So a lot of these organizations really need…and individuals as well need cat litter. It seems like we’re always short on that and cat food more than even dog food. But we take it all and once the pet food bank opens…

Sharon: We will need it all.

Steven: …we will take as much as you can give.

Kyle: And to keep appraised of the food bank, just go to the website and there will be…eventually…it’s still a work in progress.

Steven: Right. It’s close. That’s been our goal from the beginning is to open the first one and that’s what we’ve been working at for two-and-a-half years so…

Kyle: Perfect. So the website was www.flsoar.org. There’s links in the show notes to both the website and the Facebook page. Whichever you wanna go to, dear listener. So yeah.

Steven: It’s awesome.

Kyle: Is there anything else that you wish I would’ve asked today?

Steven: Pause for a second. There is a large problem in the Tampa Bay…and in every city and town, especially big cities. You drive to any mobile home park and there’s so many of them here and you see the cats just running out from underneath the mobile homes all over the…the feral cat population is tremendous in this area. You can go to any industrial area over in Tampa. I went to Boston Terrier Rescue event years ago and I walked outside and looked down this little ravine and there was water, dirty water flooded with gas puddles on top of that. And there were cats, a lot of cats coming out of the sewer and drinking out of this water. And that’s all over the Bay Area and further east and…

Kyle: Do we have like an active, like, spay and neuter, like a…

Steven: Yeah, there are organizations and we are gonna be posting them very shortly on the website as well. By the time you’re listening to this they should hopefully already be there. You can go online and you can google that as well but there’s many catch and release programs that are trying to at least stop the population flow and that’s really where it begins. You really gotta stop it at that. And people just think it’s only cats. It’s not. If you go over the areas like [inaudible 00:24:57] and…

Kyle: Yeah, there’s feral dogs running around and…

Steven: There’s many areas with a lot of feral dogs and there’s an area over towards Winter Haven where there’s…I drive over there and there’s a lot of Chihuahuas running around. A lot of them…

Kyle: A Chihuahua herd.

Steven: There are, and it’s sad because the…

Kyle: Sorry.

Sharon: No, it’s a visual. I can understand that.

Kyle: It’s kinda funny. It’s kinda funny.

Steven: There’s a lot of them and, you know, you see them and they’re hanging down. They’ve had so many litters of puppies. And we have a coyote problem as well. So a lot of people’s animals are being attacked by coyotes as well so…

Kyle: That’s true. I didn’t believe it until somebody showed me a picture. Because I live on Shore Acres, which is, you know, it’s an island so…and somebody…I was like, “That’s probably just a, you know, ugly looking dog.” But no, it was actually a coyote.

Steven: One actually broke into our back porch and ripped a metal bar up and ripped through the screen and attacked our cat that was on the back porch and the cat had to be put down. So they do come out like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning and they go onto back porches and they’re scavengers.

Kyle: And I know I was in a community up in Largo for my real estate and I was in the office talking with a lady and she pulls out this little metal cylinder. She’s like, “Hey, check that out.” And I look at it and there’s like this scraggly gray fur on it. And I was like, “What is…” I was like, “Is this like a tranquilizer dart?” And she’s like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “We had a coyote in here up…” like the north end of Lake Seminole.” She’s like, “We had a coyote in here and we had to have the, you know, Game Commission or whatever come out. They tranquilized him. They transported it, you know, [inaudible 00:26:28] or wherever.”

Sharon: And she kept the tranquilizer?

Kyle: Yeah, yeah. It’s there on her desk. Well, thank you so much, Steven and Sharon. Thank you for coming out and…

Sharon: Thank you, sir.

Steven: Thank you, Kyle, very much. We appreciate it, and on behalf of the animals and the sea life, they appreciate it so…

Kyle: Meow.

Steven: There you go.

Kyle: All right. So yeah. So check out the show notes and see how you can help the great folks at SOAR.

Sharon: Yay.

Steven: We appreciate it.

Kyle: And now, here is your fact. There are more fake flamingoes in the world than there are real flamingoes. All right, everybody. Hope you enjoyed listening to us, you know, put a round in for the record books there. Today we’re being played out by Carlos Strong again and this song is called “Apologize.” Before we get to that though I would like to invite you to come over to the website, greatthingstb.com, and we got some really good stuff over there. In addition to show notes, we also have some forms and community that, you know, allows me to more directly interact with you and, you know, we can have a conversation back and forth, you can recommend things to me, you can talk with other listeners and, you know, and give recommendations and all that stuff. I know some people prefer Facebook for that sort of stuff but honestly a lot of the changes that they have put into place the last few months has really hindered the discussion groups and all that, which I would also be more than happy to talk about with anybody. So yeah.

I’m also a local realtor. So if you’re looking for a great home in Tampa Bay, I’d be more than happy to help you out with that. And you can reach out to me via email. My email is kyle@greatthingstb.com and yeah, I’m over here at Keller Williams. Good group of folks. If you have any questions or comments about the episode please just come on by the website, leave us a message. And again, playing us out here is Carlos Strong, “Apologize.” And I gotta say this is really one of my favorite ones that’s been submitted so far. This one really was really, really good and I’m actually looking and hoping to interview them soon. Just yeah, very good work. So anyway, I hope you enjoy.

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