What’s up! I’m Matt and I have been fostering dogs and cats alongside MCP for the past five years. I certainly was not the ideal candidate to partner with a rescue. Prior to adopting our overly anxious, people wary, and severely conflicted 90-pound Pitbull Rottweiler mutt named Finnick (and having zero clue how to care for or communicate with him), I was incredibly ignorant to the often overwhelming and interconnected realities of animals, the city of Chicago, and inequality. However, Finnick’s needs led my partner and I to seek out other people and animals who could help us navigate the complexities and challenges of our new life with Finnick and, looking back, it’s not surprising we connected with MCP. MCP and their partner network of trainers, day care professionals, and volunteers, innately understood Finnick’s needs (and ours!) and in many ways adopted us into their broad, ever-expanding family. And to this day, I think that is fundamentally what MCP strives to do.

To be sure, MCP saves dogs from unspeakable circumstances, takes on medical cases that at times eclipse my annual salary at my day job, and spends thousands on training for dogs like Finnick. However, what makes MCP truly unique is the way they spurn reductionistic definitions of humans, animals, and their relationships to one another, as they strive to uncover the particularity of each individual being. In short, MCP adopts people and dogs in as opposed to out. This is to say, whether you’re an animal or human looking for that forever someone, when you connect with MCP you are embraced for life by an interspecies community gesturing towards an otherwise way of doing family in a city that no doubt needs it. So when i’m not doing my data science work, reading for my phd, hiking dunes with Finnick, or brunching with my MCP foster fail and pittie queen (she is the only one I promise!) The Marvelous Miss Masil Basil, you’ll probably find me volunteering with my MCP family, ready to adopt in another underdog human or animal looking for a home.