A Dog Lover's Rescue Mission

A Dog Lover’s Mission

Did you know that over 77 million dogs provide comfort and companionship for their owners in approximately 69 million households?? Did you also know that there are about 6.3 million unfortunate dogs who enter rescue shelters in the U.S. each year? Of those, only 8-11% are lucky enough to move to foster homes, and only around 40% ever get adopted from animal shelters, humane societies, or rescue groups. The rest are destroyed in kill shelters or left to languish in cages hoping to be adopted someday. Sadly, the older a dog gets, the less chance they have of finding a good home.

We’re Mike and Kami, and we’re photographers. We met in Huntington Beach, CA, while photographing the sunset on New Year’s Eve. We quickly realized we had a lot in common; not only a passion for photography but also a love for dogs! And as our relationship grew, our love and passion began to develop into something extraordinary.

Together, we enjoy going out photographing dogs, and during our photo outings, we began to hear the stories about the dogs we were photographing from their humans. Many of the dogs were rescues, having been abandoned, abused, or neglected. And a lot of these stories really tugged on our heartstrings!

That was a WOW moment for us! So, we began posting some of the stories on our Instagram social media account, @DogsMadeFamous, along with the images of those dogs, which started getting a lot of attention and led to some adoptions! We decided we wanted to make a difference and see if we could help more dogs get rescued through the generous help of other kind people.

We have a great relationship with a local pet store, and they loved our idea of setting up pop-up photo booth events in their store to photograph dogs and give a percentage of our proceeds to a dog rescue charity. Not only was it a huge success, but we had fun and met many more dogs and the people who rescued them from misery and heartache.

A perfect plan began to fall in place for us as we have been thinking of taking a year, 2023, to travel across the country with our 3 dogs in a motorhome we purchased from our recently widowed friend.

With a purpose for our trip, we’re visiting rescue shelters throughout the country to photograph the dogs and will share their stories with the local media and on our Instagram and Facebook accounts. Our goal is to try and raise awareness of the many poor dogs who need a loving home. We will also be promoting the local shelters and adoption agencies simultaneously.

We will be utilizing the GoFundMe gifts to fund our mission and help all the dogs we can to get the love, attention and, most of all, a forever home where they can bring love and happiness to their lucky owners.

We’ll also be holding informal photo shoots in our campsites for fellow RV travelers and their 4-legged friends, and when we can, we’ll have pop-up photo booths in local pet stores. Both will help raise additional funds to extend our mission.

Helping this cause in any way possible will be the most fulfilling thing we can imagine doing with our time. When a dog finds a home, it is the most indescribable and overwhelming feeling of gratitude and happiness for us and everyone involved.

We ask you to join us on this journey in any way you can because every little bit will help our cause.

We thank you so much for caring with your donation and being a part of helping these deserving dogs find love and happiness while bringing unbelievable joy to their forever homes!!

Gratefully,

Mike and Kami