Jordan Alley, a senior at Blue Mountain created blankets and donated time and resources to local animal shelters for her senior project. Alley started her passion for helping animals in shelters through her Southern New Hampshire University college composition class. She did a research project about the struggles that animal shelters face. Between funding, donations, and volunteers, Alley wanted to do more to help. For Alley’s senior project, she will create no-tie blankets for the kittens or their crates and donate her time and other resources that the shelters may need. Alley wants to show the importance of helping animals in shelters. She is currently volunteering at the Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society and Second Chance Animal Rescue. Alley voices, “I would convince anybody and everybody to adopt a pet and give it a forever home.” 

Senior projects consist of students choosing something they are passionate about and creating a project that meets all the transferable skills they need to graduate. Senior projects can be something they want to do in a future career, or just a passion project. Because Alley had already started her animal shelter research project in her college composition class, she was able to use what she knew about these shelters and transfer it to her senior project. Leah Gawel a senior advisor and English teacher at Blue Mountain talked about how Jordan wrote letters, emails and made phone calls to ask different shelters what she could do, and how she could help. Alley only heard from two shelters so far and was told time and blankets would be the best things she could do for them. Because animal shelters are so understaffed, Alley decided to contact teachers and staff members to see if they would be willing to volunteer their time to help out at shelters as well. She will be fundraising money for the fabric to create no-sew blankets for the animals and has already spent some of her own money on fabric. In the spring, Alley along with the rest of the seniors, will have to present their projects to the community.