As My Dog Is My Home continues to educate different stakeholders about the Providing for Unhoused People with Pets (PUPP) Act, we have been engaging faith communities to discuss the importance of how their congregants, spaces, and constituent voices can contribute to an end to homelessness for people and animals alike.
Recently, team members of My Dog Is My Home were interviewed by Reverend Daniel Lawlor, Co-Director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth, about the PUPP Act and its connection to climate justice. Read the interview below.
Reverend Daniel Lawlor (RDL): Who are you, and what is your role at My Dog Is My Home?
Christine Kim (CK): My name is Christine Kim and I am the founder of My Dog Is My Home.
Mason Castillo (MC): I am Mason Castillo and I am My Dog Is My Home’s Policy Associate.
RDL: My Dog Is My Home is actively advocating for pet friendly affordable housing through the PUPP (Providing for Unhoused People with Pets) Act. Why are you inspired by this work?
CK: As a front line social worker in housing and homelessness organizations, I saw how much people needed their animals and how the “no pets allowed” rule hurt people’s ability to get off the streets. Sometimes, people would make the hard decision to part with their animals in order to access shelter or housing — a highly traumatic event on top of the losses they had already experienced. For organizations and advocates working to end homelessness and provide trauma-informed care, we need to embrace animals as a part of our social systems and include them in service planning. There is no good reason to continue to exclude them when we have existing pet-friendly models of sheltering and housing people and their animals together providing us with blueprints, and when all the scientific evidence shows us that pet-friendly shelters and housing are a significant gap in services.
I also viscerally understand that homelessness and the dearth of affordable, pet-inclusive housing affects us all. I have experienced housing insecurity with my companion animals. My family members have experienced housing insecurity. My friends and neighbors have experienced housing insecurity. There is no “us and them.” This is an issue that impacts each of us.
The PUPP Act will ensure that funding is available to create emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing that is inclusive of people’s animals. Mason and I both understand this need from a professional standpoint, as well as a personal one.
MC: When I was 16 years old I had to live in the streets for a while. Although every story is different and we all have different experiences, I was lucky in the sense that I was able to stay with friends sometimes. This wouldn’t have been possible for me if I had animals. There were even fewer shelters that accepted animals back then.
I can’t imagine a life without my dogs and cats today. But I’m also painfully aware of the current housing insecurity crisis. The chances of me becoming homeless again at 37, with a career and a steady income, are still too high for my comfort.
No one should have to choose between a roof and their family. I’ve worked really hard to bring this reality to everything I do to help me find the compassion and the strength to do my job. I currently work for a municipal animal shelter and let me tell you, the things that I see are a reminder that anyone can experience homelessness at any time. The truth is that people love their animals. I’ve never met someone faced with the nightmare of losing their home that was happy to have to surrender their animals to me. Homeless people deserve dignity, respect and love and I believe that the PUPP Act will help many people and many organizations ensure they get that, but we need to pass it first.
RDL: During a time of extreme weather, why should Unitarian Universalists be involved with advocating for pet friendly affordable housing?
CK: The fights for climate justice and affordable housing, as well as pet-friendly affordable housing, are all related. Climate change and extreme weather hit the most vulnerable populations the hardest, and climate disasters inevitably cause loss of homes, mass movement, and migration for people and animals alike.
Mason and I both are not only involved in My Dog Is My Home, but we are also advocates for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, some of whom are seeking safety with their animal companions, making long and dangerous journeys with their beloved dogs and cats. Broadly speaking, our advocacy is in the space of “home” — those who left it, and those who are seeking it.
To me, it makes utter and complete sense that even outside of Mason and myself, many of us at My Dog Is My Home believe deeply in the concept of “sanctuary,” push our governments to rise to occasion to welcome migrants to our communities, and also believe that the climate crisis is the greatest threat to humanity. Without addressing climate change, the homelessness crisis will grow ever more urgent. Without affordable housing, we will be lacking a critical tool to save the lives of the constant stream of people being displaced by an already changed climate.
Hurricane Katrina is a classic example of what happens when emergency systems, including the ones activated for extreme weather, leave the animals behind. Not only were countless animals forcibly left behind, but the people who were coerced to abandon their animals had to suffer the loss and trauma of being separated from their furry family members with no promise of reunification and very often no peace of mind that their animals were rescued.
The national outcry of how animal evacuations were handled during Hurricane Katrina led to the bi-partisan Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act. During increasingly polarized times, I am hopeful that the deep love people have for their animals is still a common thread across the aisle and that we can all agree that people need their animals and their animals need their people in times of crisis. This is why I believe the PUPP Act can and will pass.
Unitarian Universalists need to use their powerful constituent voices to pass this very common sense bill that can protect the lives of so many.
MC: I don’t think we can talk about climate justice without bringing up immigration, racism, health care and of course, affordable housing. We cannot advocate for one and ignore the others because there are direct correlations between all of them. We have a chance to pass a piece of legislation that will actually change this.
We can’t keep ignoring the signs that we are experiencing a climate crisis. My community - an immigrant community - is at the highest risk of displacement due to the extreme weather we’ve had. We recently suffered one of the worst winter storms in the history of Texas. The electrical grid wasn’t prepared for it. A lot of people were displaced, a lot of people lost everything they had. As a result, they had to say goodbye to their pets to survive. This year we’ve had record-breaking high temperatures that not only put our homeless population at risk, but also those who felt secure about their housing situation. The grid, one more time, wasn’t prepared for it. And one more time, a lot of animals were surrendered to animal shelters.
On a greater scale, human displacement by climate crisis is a reality we have to face. We have asylum seekers traveling great distances with their animals. They get separated at the border because there’s no infrastructure to address the situation. What’s worse is that they can get deported or transferred to another holding facility while their animals stay here. There are small rescues, like the Border Pups in El Paso, that work on reuniting immigrants with their animals but for the most part, there’s no way to house them together because we don’t have holding facilities or temporary shelters for immigrants with their animals.
It’s inhumane to put people through this trauma, not to mention what the animals have to go through. The PUPP Act will address some of these issues by offering a path for pet friendly affordable housing and emergency shelter.
RDL: How is this advocacy related to the upcoming US Farm Bill negotiations?
CK: The PUPP Act is being wrapped into the Farm Bill because of its relation to non-human animals. Similar to the way the Pets and Women Safety (PAWS) Act was passed by tying it to the appropriations in the Farm Bill in 2018, the PUPP Act will use the same strategy. This also means that if the PUPP Act does not pass during this Congress, we may have to wait another 5 years before the Farm Bill is reauthorized.
RDL: What are ways to get involved in this campaign?
MC: I think this campaign transcends the limits of the legislature. Obviously, the first and most important call to action would be to push for the PUPP Act to be passed. It would provide the infrastructure needed to immediately address some of the biggest issues. If someone is reading this and has never heard of the PUPP Act or the work that My Dog Is My Home is doing, please follow us on social media and support our cause. Use your voice as a constituent to ensure your representatives understand that this is one of those rare instances in which we can immediately fix a problem by passing a law. There are other issues right now that require a deeper mentality and cultural shifts that may never be solved in my lifetime. But being able to keep homeless people and their pets together isn’t one of them. We can change many lives right now. Beyond the PUPP Act, we need to find compassion in ourselves towards people that have no place to go. I was one of the lucky ones that had enough privilege and used it to get out of the streets. A lot of people can’t do that. Our system and our laws punish the poor and keep us oppressed. This is an issue that requires all of us to work together to find a permanent solution. The housing crisis, climate change, racial inequality, LGBTQIA rights, reproductive rights, access to health care and mental health support; all of these issues are not isolated. I’m not asking people to fix a system that has been broken since the beginning of time, I’m asking people to be more human towards those who are trapped in a homelessness situation. A good way to learn to deconstruct your mentality towards homelessness would be to join our Co-Sheltering Collaborative.
RDL: If you could have lunch with any Climate Justice leader, who would you want to spend time with, and why?
CK: I have to go with the young people who sued the State of Montana and recently won their case for their own constitutional right to a healthful environment, holding their government and fossil fuel stakeholders accountable for polluting the environment. I want to congratulate them on their victory and tell them how much I admire their vision, not only for a better future for generations to come, but to establish that they deserve the conditions to thrive. I am proud of them and inspired, and I hope we all learn to act with the urgency they have demonstrated.
MC: A lot of names come to my mind but if I could pick, I would love to sit down with land protectors to learn more about their culture and traditions, and at the same time, about the ways I can help protect their land. Two people I would love to meet are Quannah Chasinghorse and Xiye Bastida. Quannah was born in the Navajo Nation and is Han Gwichi’in from Eeagle, Alaskan and Lakota Siux. She’s a fourth generation land protector for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and at 17 lobbied in support of HR 11-46, a bill that will protect the coastal plain from oil and gas development. The bill was reintroduced this year.
Xiye is Mexican Otomi-Tolteca, and at 21 she’s already a leader for the indigenous and immigrant community of climate activists. At a young age, she moved with her family to NYC from San Pedro, Tultepec due to the extreme floods that followed several years of drought. She’s currently an organizer for Fridays for Future, part of the administration committee for People’s Climate Movement, and co-founded the Re-Earth initiative, a youth-led organization that focuses on highlighting the intersectionality of the climate crisis.