A Pond for a Loving Family

----- Our Situation -----

We're a trans, disabled couple, a flock of ducks (found on IG @backyardducks), a disabled chicken, and our cat.

We are currently disadvantaged and housing insecure in Pittsburgh, though thankfully we have a place to go to in North Carolina.

What we need is financial assistance to make the 300 mile move, get ourselves a trailer to live in, and pay back our rent for our previous housing.

We must move out of our current place by the end of September, and need a shelter by the beginning of winter -- otherwise we will lose our duck children, and have our lives thrown into disarray without a place to go.

All funds raised will go to moving expenses (about $1000), the trailer (anywhere from $3-6000) and repaying our also trans and disabled home owner who let us stay at her house.

Achieving this will provide long-term stability for a growing family in need, and place us somewhere we can be healthy, happy, and hopeful for a long, long time.

----- More About Us and Our Flock -----

Valerie came into Jozi’s life at a time when she felt terribly alone and needed something to anchor to and live for,

And so together they visited the East End Animal Rescue and met Coach Bombay, a young abandoned duck also on her lonesome.

We fell in love with Coach (and eventually each other) and adopted her on the spot, and made a vow together to do everything we could to provide for that duck’s happiness.

We have been partnered for about two years now, bound by the love we have for our flock who rely on us.

Started from one single rescue duck, our flock has grown and grown to give us the big happy family we have today.

We stuck together and by our family even as turn of circumstances one after the other threatened to and did displace us again and again.

We have been pushed to move twice in the two years since we all first met, and circumstance says again that it is time for us for us to leave.

So we wish to find and push towards something lasting and meaningful for us and our ducks.

Something happening to them because of our ill fortunes is unbearable.

Giving them a life we can be proud of means more to us than staying where we are, so we are willing to let go of our old lives to give these animals wonderful ones if we can.

Duck-rearing is understandably outside of a number of potential living situations' ability to handle our needs.

Luckily we've found the perfect spot, only problem is it's 300 miles away in North Carolina - Jozi’s father recently retired to a plot of ten acres and a pond in North Carolina and has offered to let us and our ducks stay there.

The caveat is that there would be no space for the two of us to physically live in, and so after deliberation we decided that buying a used trailer to fix up and live in may be our only chance.

Valerie is physically disabled from chronic illness due to 20 years of type 1 diabetes, and Jozi is neurodivergent and mentally ill, so we're each only able to make three figures a month in our respective available lines of work.

Enough to provide for our animals, enough to get by if we lived somewhere with a lower cost of living, but not enough to invest in a move to another state.

We'd like nothing more than to have everyone in the family around one big pond, but we have to get everyone there first. We have a plan to get everyone and everything down to the new watering hole (pictured), but we need to figure out how we're going to pay for it all. That's where you can come in to help. So we're coming to our community to ask for your assistance in making this a reality - we'd be eternally grateful and you'd be helping to build a communal space for a growing, loving family.