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Report September 2016 – December 2017

February 18, 2018

Dear Donors,

Firstly, we want to wish you all a happy new year and send you our heartfelt gratitude for your kindness these last 15 months. Without your help, we could not have survived, what to speak of continuing this important work here.

We have done a lot of work on the property since we purchased it in October 2016. Fences were erected, shelters built for all the animals, including the cows, pigs, and horse, and there were also renovations on the house to better accommodate the many volunteers that come to stay with us.

One of the best things about this new property is that we are able to make it a fully accessible and public animal sanctuary, because we have no fear of the people dumping animals, since we are in a safe neighborhood and the community is gated. It also has good public transport, is close to the city and is a pleasant drive.

We really appreciate your support and hope that you will stay with us as we try to promote equality for all beings through our advocacy and our example of love and care for the most vulnerable animals in Colombia.

Warmest regards,

Juliana Castaneda Turner
Co-founder and Director

New Short Film

Cameron Brown visited the sanctuary and made this lovely short film promoting our missions. See it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty8_hYA8BnE&feature=youtu.be

Rescued Animals

During 2017, we rescued 21 animals, including 1 pig, 4 rabbits, 4 chickens, 2 roosters, 7 dogs, 2 turkeys and 1 new male calf, who we named Gopal.

We have 96 animals currently under our care:

You can read some of these rescue stories here:

• Rescued Turkeys Meet each other for first time
• He is Just a Puppy that Wants a New Life
• Old Dog Hit by a Car is Paralyzed

However, most of the stories we post are only on the Sanctuary Facebook page www.Facebook.com/julianasAnimalSanctuary

Long-term Volunteers

Canadian born Amelia Ross, who was recently with Sea Shepherd as their head chef has been volunteering now for 3 months at JAS and will return to us again after another stint with Sea Shepherd during the summer.  

Earlier last year, we also had a wonderful Canadian family, Julie, Patrick and their son, Max volunteered for 3 months at JAS, offering tremendous help. Patrick even built a shelter for the young bulls, Gopal and Sundara and our horse, Shyam.

Nicola Dahle was a tremendously important asset to the success of our project. She originally volunteered for a few weeks at our other property and then agreed to come and stay for one year!

Food Quality

All the animals get a healthy diet of grains, fruits, and vegetables, including the dogs who are fed a special vegan dog food that is delivered to us from the city of Cali, about a 10-hour drive by truck to our sanctuary.

Medical Emergencies

Our hen, Kunti, was the first chicken in the country to have a surgery on her leg. We are happy to report that the surgery was successful and she is enjoying life again. Both the baby calves also had surgeries, Poldark the pig, and our dogs, Bo to repair his legs, and Eden who was raped before we rescued her, had 5 major surgeries to repair her hips, legs and anus. The cost of all these surgeries was well over $5000. We also sponsored sterilization surgery for 150 street dogs.

Social Media Outreach

Our main outreach platform is Facebook and Instagram. We get a lot of engagement and positive feedback from our daily posts. Here are some examples. As you can see, Juliana’s son, Bhimal Fox is also featured. In fact, he has his own Facebook page where Juliana promotes vegan parenting. Bhimal has also been featured in The Dodo and GaryTV.

Vegan Cooking Workshops

Advocacy has always been major component of our project here from the beginning. In terms of animal rights, Colombia is probably ten years behind the United States. So there is a lot to do but we feel up to the task and have some new innovative projects underway.

You’ll be pleased to learn that we got a grant from The Unbound Project for $10,000 CAD. The story was featured on the Unbound website last year. 

http://unboundproject.org/current-stories/juliana-castaneda/

With this grant, we have already given 12 free vegan cooking workshops, with a focus on parents and we plan to do 2 per month. The rule is each participant has to bring along one non-vegan family member. See story here: https://julianasanimalsanctuary.org/vegan-cooking-workshops-colombia/

So far we have had 240 people have participated in these workshops.

The Pollination Project also awarded us a grant of $3000 to conduct vegan cooking workshops.

3D Visual Experience

We also purchased two sets of 3D vision glasses to show the reality behind the meat trade and to our knowledge we will be the first to offer this experience in Colombia. We will be visiting one of three colleges, Universidad de la sale (15,190 students), Universidad Javeriana (13,000 students), Universidad del Rosario (13,900 students) one day a week with these and plan to get 100 students each time to use them.

Educational Materials

We are going to launch the first vegan comic for kids and teens with the help of our vegan friend and award-winning Chilean artist, Juan Faundez. 20,000 copies of this magazine will be printed and distributed for free in schools and universities.Some of the artwork will be presented in 3D art and some as sketches. The government schools we will visit will be the same ones that Juliana has already given talks at in the past, COLEGIO DEPARTAMENTAL DOMINGO SAVIO, COLEGIO TECNICO COMERCIAL, COLEGIO CAMPESTRE LOS ENCENILLOS and MARIANO OSPINA RODRIGUEZ.

Vegan Food Relief

Juliana is also the founder of Meat-Free Monday in Colombia www.lunessincarne.co and has coordinated 4 free vegan meal distributions in Bogota  and one in the city of Medellin with the local Food for Life Colombia that she manage, where vegan information is also given out. 

Public Lectures & Advocacy

Juliana gave 3 talks at the first ever vegan festival in Bogota, where she spoke about veganism and the sanctuary.

In August, 2017, Paul and Juliana attended the annual Animal Rights Conference where she met with many of the donors and supporters.

Protesting

In February, we all attended the rally to protest the re-introduction of Bullfighting in Bogota. See story here: https://julianasanimalsanctuary.org/bullfight-back-colombia/

IVU Vegfest in Colombia

The Vegetarian Union for Latin America (UVLA) recently elected Juliana to be the  new president and this means she will be coordinating the IVU Vegfest #12 which will take place for the first time ever, in Colombia! This event is the biggest vegan event in South America and goes on for 3 days with speakers from all over the world. It is similar to the animal rights conference in the US and connected with the International Vegetarian Union Vegfests that take place around the world. IVU website is www.IVU.org

Naturally, Juliana’s Animal Sanctuary will be the host and will get maximum exposure. We will also include a visit to the sanctuary as part of the conference activities.

The event will be over 3 days and we expect to get at least 300 people a day.

Emergency Food Relief

For some time now, Juliana has been the Food for Life Global coordinator for South America. Despite her busy schedule, she oversaw relief efforts for the mudslides in Colombia, arranging for a team of volunteers to visit the disaster area to provide vegan meals and medical assistance to animals. Juliana raised the funds through GoFundme.

More recently, she oversaw vegan food relief in Mexico after the massive earthquake. See: https://ffl.org/11699/ffl-mexico-responds-immediately-to-massive-earthquake/ and has been instrumental in establishing successful Food for Life projects in Chile and Argentina.

Volunteers

Over the last 14 months, we have accommodated 29 volunteers from 9 different countries, as well as 7 local people. The visitors spent from 1 – 4 week each at the sanctuary, whereas the locals would come for the day. Each of these volunteers got to experience the joy of caring for our animals and the lovely vegan meals we prepare for them. They left with a smile and told their friends back home.

Colombian people are very open to advocacy and they book visits all the time to the sanctuary. However, what Colombians are not ready to do is donate and volunteer, this is because most people cannot afford to donate and they cannot volunteer because they are working to make money. Most people work between 10-12 hours a day, but still they make efforts to come and visit us.

Here are just some examples of volunteers reporting on their positive experience at the sanctuary.

Visitors

During 2017, we had over 200 visitors to the sanctuary, who all got a tour of the sanctuary and an introduction to the animals as well as a vegan snacks. Please keep in mind that most of last year we were building the sanctuary infrastructure, so we could not dedicate as much time as we have would liked. Our plan is to increase visitation substantially going forward.

Cassandra Bankson

Cassandra is an extremely popular Youtube celebrity with a million subscribers. Her and her mother visited the sanctuary and are now vegan and Cassandra has done tremendous promotion of the sanctuary through her social media.

Food Yoga Academy

This project is in stage one of development wherein all the training is online, however, in the master level training, students will be invited to visit the sanctuary and learn directly from Paul and Juliana.

Our vision is to acquire the adjoining lands so that we can develop the full expression of this project which will include providing cabins for accommodation, a yoga studio and a health and wellness center, with all the profits benefitting the sanctuary.  

For now, the academy is hosted online only at www.foodyogaacademy.com offering level 1 and 2 of Food Yogi Certification. The master level will be taught in person at the sanctuary. We already have 20 students enrolled.

• Annual Report PDF (PDF)