Enter James It’s 9am and James Myers pulls the breakfast wagon down the bumpy gravel driveway. The animals, most of them grouped into their respective paddocks, see him coming and start their excited chatter. In the wagon there’s hay for the cows, grain for the donkeys, table scraps for the pigs, and feed for the birds, all in plastic bins and old metal stock pots stacked up to a precarious height. James has been the primary animal caretaker at the sanctuary since October 2021, and before that he was one of its many volunteers. Tragedy had struck again when another founding member, Ken, passed away, leaving Rob to continue the vision alone. After applying for and landing the job, James moved into Ken’s vacant yurt, graduating from casual volunteer to land-partner. “I think animals are naturally attracted to me,” James says. “They always want to be around me. Living here feels very resonant with who I am—this place is so wide and spread out, the sky is open and the land is beautiful.” Feeding the donkeys is James’ favorite part of the twice-daily chores. “They make it so easy to love them,” he says. “They just have so much personality, it makes it really enjoyable to be around them.” James finishes his rounds and gets ready for the volunteers to arrive. The sanctuary hosts work days once a month when community members can come and contribute. The influx of new faces makes Eve more skittish than normal, and she shies away from the food trough as Caleb happily chomps away. Rob comes into the pasture and squats down with a handful of feed in his outstretched arm. Her Left to Right: Sanctuary co-founder Rob Cole, volunteer Nikki Stephens, and primary animal caretaker James Myers clear ground to make space eyes light up, and she for vegetable gardens at the organization’s 20-acre property in Mountain View during one of its monthly volunteer days. photo by Stefan Verbano nervously takes two steps forward and one step back. Slowly she inches closer as Rob gently calls her these animals,” Rob says. “A lot of people could rescue, you name. Next her muzzle is buried in his palm, her anxiety is know, foster dogs and cats in their home, that’s not a problem. quelled, and his other hand sneaks up to rub her head. But there were a lot of farm animals that needed help, too, so This is a snapshot of the sanctuary’s greatest aspiration: to we cobbled together some fencing and makeshift shelters and take in a farm animal like Eve, who’s been battered by life, we took in as many animals as we could house as quickly as made to live in fear and traumatized by a harrowing ordeal, we could.” and over the months and years help her heal and muster the The scene was hectic. Sanctuary staff and community courage to eat out of a cupped hand. The work is hard and volunteers worked long days with few resources, slapping their progress is sometimes slow, but to see her in moments together old shipping pallets and lengths of cast-off corrugated like this makes it all worth it. metal roofing. Even today the haphazard nature of the original livestock structures can still be seen in their sagging roofs and For more information: fpgsanctuary.org walls that are clearly not square, although the animals don’t seem to mind.
KeOlaMagazine.com | May – June 2022
FPG’s Start The Fellowship for Perpetual Growth was founded as a community-focused nonprofit in 2016 by Rob and two friends: Sonja, an animal lover, and Ken, a permaculturist. Rob rounded out the group with his past experience as an IT specialist and computer program manager, transferring his organizational skills and eye for efficiency from technological systems to agricultural systems. Tragically, Sonja passed away in 2016 after the land was purchased but before boots were on the ground. The next year was spent surveying and gathering data about rain and wind patterns, as well as sun exposure and soil drainage. They started earth-moving in the beginning of 2018, and just a few months later volcanic fissures began to explode in Leilani Estates. In that moment, besides its two large yurts and shipping container barn, the sanctuary had little infrastructure set up for animals. “Since we’re a nonprofit, our duty is to the community, and what the community needed in that moment was to rescue
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