“All pets are equal in their capacity to love and suffer. The only difference is that some pet owners can afford veterinary services and others cannot.”
Multnomah County records indicate the homeless population grew twenty percent between 2017 and 2019, and the suffering of their companion animals grew along with it. The Portland Animal Welfare Team — PAW Team — has been quietly handling the consequences since the early 1990s, when a handful of veterinarians began offering free care to people who had nowhere else to go.
This essay is the abridged version of a campaign proposal I built for them. It argues that the answer to a fast-paced veterinary office isn't a louder ask — it's a smarter ask. Brief, internet-native, and routed through the relationships PAW Team already has. Three months. Seven new monthly donors. One hashtag. No event. The campaign starts with a simple slogan and ends with a measurable outcome.
Read the full proposal →
I'm Siarra. I trained as a broadcast journalist, fell sideways into marketing and public relations, ran SEO for sixty-plus accounts at a Pacific Northwest newspaper, and somewhere along the way picked up enough conflict resolution coursework to make me dangerous in a meeting. The B.S. in Arts & Letters from PSU is the most accurate description of what I actually do.
I am preparing for doctoral work in communication and peace studies. The questions I keep returning to: how do communities build the capacity to resolve their own conflicts? Who gets to define a development “outcome,” and what gets lost when we let outsiders write the metric? What does a strategic communication campaign look like when its readers genuinely have no time?
I have lived briefly in many places. I have trained Krav Maga near the Gaza Strip and pottery in the seventh grade. My father — Tata — is a horticulturalist who can name any plant in Latin and forgets to call on holidays; both facts have shaped what I believe about hospitality. I write in the morning, in public, where the ambient human energy keeps the prose honest.
Roughly once a month. Sometimes a draft chapter, sometimes a small thing I've been thinking about, never anything I wouldn't be proud to have my father read. No tracking pixels, no funnels, no algorithm. Just writing, when it's ready.