Raising funds, awareness for animal shelters

It’s not often you find people volunteering to be cramped into a kennel, threatened to be pied or slimed. But it was the case Saturday and all for a good cause.

Jordan’s Way visited the Humane Society of Elmore County to help raise funds and awareness for shelter animals in Elmore County. It’s a mission Jordan’s Way founder Kris Rotonda has been on for more than five years.

“It started out of a passion to help shelter dogs,” Humane Society of Elmore County director Rea Cord said.

Rotonda went to a Florida shelter in 2007 looking for an animal friend. He found Jordan, a Bull Mastiff, German Shepherd and Samoyed mix. Jordan had been at the shelter for 3 years. For the next 11 years Jordan and Rotonda were inseparable. In 2018 Jordan died of cancer. 

The friendship set into motion what is now Jordan’s Way.

“I made a promise to honor her life by helping as many shelters in need as possible,” Rotonda said.

Rotonda was a realtor and bodybuilder and shifted gears to help animals. He started with physical challenges such as flipping a large tractor trailer tire for 13 miles to raise money for local shelters. He then spent three days in a dog cage, living like a shelter dog to raise awareness about shelters and their animals. From there Jordan’s Way took to the road for a 50-state tour to help shelters raise money and awareness.

On Saturday, Rotonda brought his energy and enthusiasm to help raise nearly $20,000 for the Elmore County shelter in three hours. He encouraged Elmore County volunteers to step out of their comfort zones.

All were pushed into kennels mainly used by dogs and challenged to use their phones to contact friends, family and contacts to donate to the shelter. There were games to go along with it.

A ghost pepper was used as inspiration to raise $1,000 in a short period of time. If the volunteers didn’t raise the money, they would eat. Luckily they didn’t have to.

Teams were pitted against each other. The winner got to pie the loser. The real loser was Cord. She was pied and hosed down by the volunteers. But she didn’t mind.

“We're looking at some major kennel repairs and stuff,” Cord said. “This is also fun. We got great people that support us, that are here, helping us do this and they are having fun with it too.”

Saturday’s events were all streamed live. Rotonda created a fun environment bringing the donors in the show. 

“It’s all in good fun,” Cord said. “It helps bring awareness to what we do.”

Rotonda did a similar fundraiser with Lake Martin Animal Rescue a few weeks ago. He came to Elmore County Saturday after doing fundraisers in Florida on Friday. He left Elmore County to go to Opelika on Saturday evening for another fundraiser.