Andy Witkowski has a question for pet owners – one that can break your heart even as he asks it.
He first invites you to imagine stepping outside with your dog for a routine walk. The sun is out, the air is fresh and your pet is happily working off some pent-up energy.
Witkowski then tells you to strip away the ending to that walk. You have no house to go back to. No fence, no gate and no door to close behind you. There’s only the sky above, a leash in your hand and nowhere inside to return.
“How would you care for your pet when work, food, warmth and medical care are no longer guaranteed?” Witkowski asks in a blog post published under his online pseudonym, Ringo, at thedandelionkind.org.
Few dog and cat owners ever stop to consider the daily complexities faced by people experiencing homelessness who have pets. In the same blog entry, Witkowski writes that he had once overlooked those challenges himself.
But after Witkowski and his wife, veterinarian Dr. Anna Ramsey, moved to Chattanooga in 2024, they began noticing an informal rescue network operating all around them. People experiencing homelessness were adopting animals off the street – not just for companionship but also out of a shared understanding of vulnerability and hardship.
The observation led Witkowski to ask another question: Does having a pet add to the burdens of homelessness or does it help carry them?
“When you’re homeless, a companion animal is sometimes the only friend you have,” Witkowski says. “But what access to care is there? If there’s no care, then you’re surrendering your dog to McKamey Animal Center or the Humane Education Society, which would be heartbreaking.”
Witkowski doesn’t pose these questions as a thought experiment. They’re a call to action, one that shapes how he and Ramsey respond to the needs they see on Chattanooga’s streets.
Nonprofit by any other name...
Witkowski exhales, his breath briefly visible in the chilly January air, and looks across the parking lot of the Dollar General on Rossville Boulevard toward a white van marked with the name The Dandelion Kind.
The Dandelion Kind is the nonprofit Witkowski and Ramsey launched to bring care directly to the pets of homeless individuals, meeting those tightly bonded pairs on the streets where they live.
The name of the endeavor needs explaining, Witkowski admits.
“Someone decided the dandelion is a weed – that it doesn’t belong – so you get rid of it,” Witkowski says. “In this country, we spend millions of dollars trying to eliminate this flower despite its incredible value. It’s vital for pollinators and it’s edible. So when we decided what kind of organization we wanted to be, we said, ‘The dandelion kind.’”
Witkowski says the organization’s name also reflects a broader critique of how homelessness is often addressed and what gets overlooked in the process.
“When policing homelessness, we push people out of camps and they go somewhere else. So our name plays into the idea that when you take time to observe a thing in real life, you can see its unique value. That’s what we’re trying to do as an organization. We take time to see every person and every pet. We all matter, and we all deserve care.”
Where the leashes lead
Witkowski turns his gaze toward Rossville Boulevard and catches a new arrival trotting around the corner of the single-story building beside the Dollar General. At the other end of the medium-sized mutt’s leash is a woman pedaling a bicycle. When the animal spots the van, it transforms into a sled dog, lunging forward, perhaps at the promise of food or the chance to reunite with its canine friends.
From the opposite direction, a young couple approaches with a bullmastiff; behind them, another woman turns toward the van cradling a baby pit bull in a purse. The procession ends with yet another woman rolling in a Labrador perched in a baby stroller, completing a steady stream that draws nearly two dozen unhoused people to the van within 30 minutes of Witkowski and Ramsey pulling in.
Each of these individuals likely carries stories of their own: how they ended up living outside, the hardships they’ve endured and the kindnesses that helped them survive. But they keep those stories to themselves. Instead, they talk about their pets.
The couple with the Bullmastiff – a hulking dog whose mournful face betrays a gentle disposition – says they watched from across the street as people in a vehicle abandoned him, along with another dog they assumed was his brother. After taking him in, they named him Alfie.
One of the women says she adopted her dog after seeing a group of children “kicking it around” in the woods.
Then there’s Marty, an elderly man bundled in layers of cold-weather clothes, a ballcap pulled low, smiling down at a small pooch he calls Angel Marie.
“She’s the most amazing dog you’ll ever see. Her talent is baby kissing. We had a kissing booth by the Dollar Tree. She charged a quarter, and I charged 50 cents,” he says, winking from beneath the folds of a weathered face.
“She once brought me a possum and put it in bed with me. She wanted me to be proud of her for making a kill – but it wasn’t dead.”
Care delivered
At its core, The Dandelion Kind operates as a preventive-care clinic for these pets, whose owners have little or no access to veterinary services. Every dog that comes through receives a rabies vaccination, a legal and public health necessity many owners have never been able to secure.
Most arrive without records or even basic knowledge of their animal’s medical history, so each visit begins with intake forms that help establish a paper trail and build continuity of care.
From there, the nonprofit addresses some of the most common and dangerous threats facing unhoused animals. Dogs are vaccinated against parvovirus, a highly contagious and often fatal disease that spreads easily in outdoor environments.
Ramsey also treats minor but painful issues such as itchy ears, eye infections and skin conditions, bandages wounds and, when necessary, draws blood for heartworm testing. Flea and tick prevention and heartworm treatment form the backbone of the organization’s work, which Witkowski says is aimed at stopping illness before it becomes life-threatening.
As the organization’s only staff members, Witkowski and Ramsey rely on a rotating group of volunteers and a network of outreach workers to help nurture trust with the unhoused community. One of those partners is Tiffany, an outreach worker with H3 Ministries, which delivers hundreds of meals each week.
Her relationships are critical, Witkowski says. She spends Thursday nights distributing food and spreading the word that veterinary care will be available the following day, a consistency that explains why so many people show up every other Friday.
On those Fridays, Ramsey sets up a table outside the back of the couple’s van, laying out syringes, test kits and medical supplies. Smaller dogs are lifted gently onto the table. For larger animals, she squats on the cold asphalt, working at eye level. One young man, dressed in tattered clothes and without a winter coat, cradles his dog in his lap as Ramsey draws blood for a heartworm test.
Volunteers hold dogs close, their body heat helping to calm the animals’ shivers. Soothing their nerves takes more work, but Ramsey moves with practiced ease, delivering each needle prick alongside steady reassurance that everything is OK.
Counting people, missing pets
While homelessness in Chattanooga is difficult to address, it’s not unmeasured. Local organizations conduct an annual Point-in-Time count each winter, a coordinated effort to identify how many people are experiencing homelessness on a single night.
The count, required by federal housing agencies and carried out by outreach workers and volunteers, provides the city’s most widely cited snapshot of need and helps guide funding and services throughout the year.
But the human numbers can flatten the day-to-day experience and the animals entwined within it. That became visible this winter when city officials cleared a Hooker Road encampment where more than 40 people and at least 20 dogs had been living, according to a report on the Chattanoogan website (www.chattanoogan.com). Advocates said the scale of the displacement highlighted how easily pets are overlooked when camps are broken up and people are forced to move.
For Witkowski, the episode underscored the limits of translating human counts into an understanding of unhoused pet ownership.
“There’s no way for me to tell you there are about X number of homeless pets in Chattanooga,” he says.
National studies suggest 10-15% of people experiencing homelessness have a pet, Witkowski says, but applying that estimate locally is complicated. The Point-in-Time count includes people staying in shelters and those living outdoors, but homelessness can also mean sleeping in a car, cycling between temporary housing, living in overcrowded conditions or relying on short-term assistance.
For The Dandelion Kind, determining eligibility is not about verification. When people arrive seeking care, Witkowski says, they are asked whether they are homeless and taken at their word.
“We work on the honor system,” he says.
What the nonprofit can measure is demand. Last year, The Dandelion Kind provided care to roughly 200 animals, a number Witkowski expects to grow. Each clinic day adds to the ledger – one built not through formal counts or surveys but through carbon-copy forms weighted down against the wind.
Finding the gap
The idea for The Dandelion Kind grew out of both experience and timing.
Ramsey spent much of her career working in animal shelters, where she developed a firsthand understanding of the gaps in care facing vulnerable pets and the people responsible for them. When she and Witkowski relocated from Texas to Chattanooga in 2024, they arrived with a long-standing interest in addressing those gaps in a more direct way.
Ramsey began volunteering with local rescue organizations – and it didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge. While Chattanooga had a robust network of nonprofits serving people experiencing homelessness, veterinary care for their animals remained largely unaddressed. When the couple approached Chatt Foundation, which provides services to homeless and low-income families, they asked a simple question: Was anyone meeting that need?
The answer was no.
“It felt like nonprofit 101,” Witkowski says. “The first question is always whether your nonprofit actually needs to exist. Chattanooga is a strong nonprofit town, but there was a gap. We identified it and said, ‘We can do this.’”
From the beginning, the effort was designed as a collaboration rather than a standalone solution. The Dandelion Kind began working alongside the Humane Education Society, city and county partners and other local organizations to complement existing outreach rather than duplicate it.
The nonprofit received its 501(c)(3) status in April 2025 – and Witkowski says the response since then has been considerable.
“We’re already overwhelmed,” he says, motioning toward the crowd of unhoused people and their pets, some of which are rooting through bags and boxes of donated leashes, collars, toys and dog coats.
Neither Witkowski nor Ramsey works full time for the nonprofit or receives pay for their labors. Witkowski is employed by an organic food certification agency that works with farms and coffee producers around the world. Ramsey continues her veterinary work, running low-cost vaccination clinics, consulting and supporting other shelters in the region.
The Dandelion Kind operates in the margins of those schedules, built around evenings, weekends and borrowed time. Keeping the work going, however, requires more than time and goodwill.
Running on donations
For all its momentum, The Dandelion Kind operates on fragile financial footing.
Much of the organization’s work – particularly heartworm prevention and treatment – is expensive. When the nonprofit is out in the community, Witkowski says, they often ask supporters to underwrite the cost of heartworm medication for individual animals, some of which require lengthy and costly treatment.
Donations can also be made through the organization’s website or by mail, and while The Dandelion Kind receives limited support from community foundations, most of its funding comes from individual contributors.
“Everything matters,” Witkowski says. “Everything counts.”
Beyond cash donations, supporters can help by purchasing supplies through the organization’s Amazon and Chewy wish lists or by volunteering their time. Witkowski says the nonprofit is especially eager for help from people with experience in grant writing or social media, areas where a young organization is still finding its footing.
Why they stay together
After Witkowski asks people to imagine how they would care for a pet while unhoused, he often hears a question in return. Survival on the streets is hard enough alone, people say, so why take on another mouth to feed?
Witkowski has a simple answer ready.
“The human-animal bond is powerful,” he says. “We’ve seen people feed their dogs before they feed themselves. And the animal wants to be a companion. It’s the most nonjudgmental relationship there is.”
As the afternoon wears on, The Dandelion Kind’s clients begin to drift out of the parking lot, returning to the streets they and their pets call home.
The woman with the Labrador struggles to lift her dog back into a stroller, eventually managing before rolling away with two bags of dog food, steroids for her pet’s itchy skin and instructions on dosage.
Marty and Angel Marie leave as well, the latter proudly sporting a newly acquired pastel winter coat.
“She’s pretty in pink, ain’t she?” Marty says, coaxing her along.
As Witkowski watches them leave and prepares to welcome new arrivals, he finishes his thought.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re homeless or live in a house,” he says. “What matters is how we as a society make sure that all pets and all people have access to health care. You don’t have to work in this community very long to realize how important that is.”