When Marta first described her vision for the rescue to me over a backyard firepit one night, and asked me to help her get the organization off the ground, I told her she was nuts. An organization that focuses its rescue work on the hardest to place animals, prevention work on one-to-one relationship building with community members? Driven by deep compassion for a single animal or person? I had spent the previous years working in the high-volume, life-or-death stakes environment of Chicago Animal Control, assisting Chicago's amazing rescue community to move as many animals as possible out of the facility and to relative safety. It is triage - help as many as you can, move past the rest, and don't look down. I knew Marta's vision would be effective in saving the lives of a couple of hundred animals every year and help to fill a need in the rescue community by working with the harder animals, but my rescue heart was too broken by the years of working in damage control to accept the importance of the idea. But she didn't let me get away with that first "heeeeelllllll no." And so after more talks, I took a leap of faith - accepting the belief that rescue work performed on the foundation of one-on-one relationships and bottomless compassion for the individual in front of you was important outside of the numbers, adding beauty to the world and mending broken hearts.

And so we began.

Hearts were mended, and continue to be so. Beauty grew, and continues grow.