Support a Community and the Horses in the Okanagan

Way’/ Hello

This GoFundMe is to help assist For the Ferals Society with meeting its goals in protecting and assisting horses on the Okanagan Indian Band. For the Ferals promotes the health and well-being of the horses and the Syilx Okanagan people through herd management, collaboration with the community, cultural revitalization, and reconnection with Tmixʷ (All living things).

Devyn Destinee is the founder of For the Ferals. She is a Syilx Okanagan woman, mother, wife, animal lover and someone who for the past 8+ years has been working within her community to care and advocate for the horses’ protection, wellbeing, and care, including avoiding any unnecessary deaths. It started with advocating for people to slow down in her community as speedy drivers were hitting horses and livestock too often, not to mention putting people in danger. Soon, it was clear there was a need to do more. The horses on the range multiplied and started depleting the grazeland for other livestock causing intensified competition between them and not enough sustenance.

The current focus is supporting the community living on the Okanagan Indian Band Reserve to maintain a healthy and sustainable herd population on the rangelands, by assisting with herding and housing during winter months, veterinary care, supplementing food, gelding, rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming horses when needed to avoid any horses being sent to slaughter.

It's also important for us to address the stigma that Indigenous people on the reserve face from settlers outside of the community and help support the community to combat that. Equally important is trying to prevent theft of horses on reserve rangeland by outside organizations/personnel who collect profits without redistributing any into OKIB community, and stopping people from abandoning old, weakened, or inbred horses on the range that people no longer want to or can care for, adding to the overpopulation challenges. Supporting her with funds will help her do this!

Doing this came and continues to come with a lot of high costs. So far, Devyn has invested her own finances to fund this, but maintaining this work requires a lot more funds and she cannot continue to sustain it on her own. We’re hoping that people will come together to help keep this moving forward, as reaching a larger audience is something we hope will be helpful. Thankfully there have been some recent donations of hay and dollars through a 'squat for dollars' campaign. Though these donations have been helpful, it’s not nearly enough to do what is necessary to create a long-lasting impact as maintaining something like this can cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For the Ferals vision includes creating job opportunities for OKIB community members, training community members in horsemanship, increasing youth participation, helping build programs that increase language knowledge for the community through collaboration with Elders and Knowledge Keepers and providing healing ceremonies that promote reconnection to horse medicine. Before we can do that, we need your help to raise funds!

Any funding raised will go towards:

• Maintaining a healthy horse population through gelding of studs, and branding horses to ensure identification

• Support community members who are experiencing challenges in caring for their horses by providing hay feed, salt licks, farrier visits and vet care assistance

• Building or renting a secure facility that can house horses who cannot stay on the range during winter months and provides a space for healing and rehabilitating horses throughout the year.

• Costs associated with upkeeping of facilities like electricity & heat

• Vet Bills/Supplies + Farrier Care + costs associated with overall well-being care for horses

• Hay, Grain, Shavings, Lick Salts /mineral blocks etc

• Moveable Panels for rounding up on the range

• Tilt Table

• Fuel Costs

• Food and equipment for teams going up on the range for round ups

• Supplies related to herd management

• Walkie talkies

• Go pros (for safety and security purposes)

• First Aid Kits

• Liability Insurance

It is not lost on us that this is an ambitious undertaking, even still, we would be so grateful if you could donate what you can, share to your networks and help build this vision of helping For the Ferals meet the needs of the community! We will continue to update donors on how the money is used and the progress of her efforts for transparency and accountability.

Limlempt / Thank you!

You can visit the website: www.fortheferals.com , follow the journey on Instagram @thedevyndestinee and @fortheferals, or on Facebook