Mimi Ausland, the 13 year old force behind Halo philanthropic partner Freekibble, is featured on the Tonic “goodness” web site. It’s the second feature article on Mimi written by Halo blogger Diane Herbst (who first covered her for People Magazine). We’re honored to be included in the story!

Here are a couple tidbits from Diane’s article:

When she was a toddler, Mimi Ausland loved animals so much her parents called her Dr. Doolittle. At her home in Bend, Oregon, Mimi rescued injured birds and fish, even spiders. At the age of seven, told she was too young to work at the local Humane Society, Mimi started mailing spare change to the shelter. “She just has this huge heart and it plays out with animals,” says her father, Kelly, 48. “She’s always been protective and passionate about animals.”

And:

Since its start on April 1, 2008, Freekibble.com has donated more than 400,000 pounds of dog and cat food. The organization is the sole supplier of food for 14 shelters across the country. Another 60 rescues have received tens of thousands of pounds of huge one-time donations. An average of 45,000 people visit the site daily. “It’s so cool, it’s really exciting,” says Mimi, a seventh grader. “I knew it was important that I did something for others.”

Click over to our news page to get the whole story!

On Friday, February 5th, don’t forget to play for the kitties on Freekibble.com!

The website and Halo, Purely For Pets have teamed up to generate five times the kibble (50 pieces) each time you play Freekibblekat.com (the cat section of Freekibble.com) for homeless cats.

Freekibble.com founder Mimi Ausland, 13, hopes that the event — called Freekibblekat Hi-5 — attracts some 65,000 players to the site that day. (On normal days, 40,000 to 50,000 people play daily; for each question answered, right or wrong, 10 pieces of kibble are raised.)

Freekibble.com’s first Hi-5 event on November 5th was a huge success: twenty-thousand meals for dogs were raised. “We hope to raise that for the cats,” says Mimi. “I know there arealot of cat lovers out there.” As of this week, FreeKibble has raised and donated 400,000 pounds of cat and dog food to scores of shelters across the U.S.

The food generated from Friday’s gaming is going to about six shelters in the Southeast; Mimi hopes the donation feeds each shelter’s cats for many months. Says Mimi: “It’s a big thing for them because it’s unusual to get high end cat food.”

Click here to send your friends and family an e-card to tell them to play on February 5th.

And click here to play FreekibbleKat.

Thank you, Humane Society, for helping make our Freekibble Hi-5 charity promotion a success! We were honored to be on their homepage, and covered in their popular Kind News web site.

Click over to our News page for the full scoop of Freekibble.

“There are two types of people in the world, passive and active,” says Jessica Harris, head of adoptions at a Louisiana shelter, “passive who want to know what their community can do for them, and your active people wonder what they can do to better their community.”

Emma Foster, 13, is one of those active people.

Emma, a winner of Freekibble.com’s Kibble Krusaders Kontest, where kids were asked to write why their shelter was special, won $1,000 worth of Halo Dinner Party for Harris’s shelter, the St. Tammany Parish Humane Society in Covington. “I feel like I’ve actually done something that will contribute to the animals that people don’t usually think about,” says Emma, an eighth grader from Abita Springs. “I felt like a guardian angel when I got the email (that she won). They deserved some love, just like people do.”

In her essay to Freekibble.com founder Mimi Ausland, Emma writes of adopting her family dog Peppi — who she calls the “best dog we’ve had” — and how the shelter was inundated with pets following Hurricane Katrina, pets who still — after five years — need a loving home. “Most of the animals lost in Katrina were people’s pets, not strays… because of this, most of them were older, and are no longer wanted,” she writes. “STPHS does their hardest to make these pets feel like they are still loved, even if nobody wants them.” Click here to read Emma’s entire essay.

Emma herself has four dogs including Peppi, a chihuahua-papillon mix. “I don’t think he’s a dog, I think he’s a gremlin,” she says, laughing. “He is really cute.” She also has about seven cats, and plans on volunteering at the STPHS to earn service hours for school. Despite her love of animals, Emma plans on becoming a medical examiner, thanks to the hit TV show C.S.I.

Mimi received almost 500 Kibble Krusader entries, and picked Emma’s for its sincerity. “She put a personal note in there, that she got the best dog ever to her,” Mimi says. “You can tell that she took awhile to write it, and I love the hurricane Katrina part. This one stood out, it was a little more personal and I appreciated that.”

As does Harris. The STPHS has, on average, 100 dogs and 50 cats at a time. Harris says that the shelter pets “absolutely love” the Halo Dinner Party on their food, and she is sure they are grateful to Emma. “To write an essay to help their humane society goes above and beyond,” says Harris, “to put herself out there with the incentive to help the animals, not to help herself but to help the animals.”

by Mimi Ausland, Freekibble.com

Hello again! This is Mimi Ausland. I am the 13 year old girl who started the two websites freekibble.com and freekibblekat.com to help feed hungry dogs and cats at our local animal shelter. Boy did it take off! Every month we are now feeding 13 shelters across the country. Part of the reason we are able to feed so many hungry dogs and cats is because I was lucky enough to be on t.v. shows including Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey. Without them and all our very generous sponsors we would not have been able to generate the 1.8 million nutritious meals to homeless dogs and cats!

We are now starting to do some new things here at freekibble.com to raise even more food for homeless dogs and cats. One big thing we’re doing is an event called the Freekibble HI-5! On November 5th, we are donating 5 times the kibble (50 pieces), for each person that plays Bow-Wow Trivia. HALO Pets is sponsoring the event with no limit on the kibble! Our goal is to raise 5 million pieces of kibble on the 5th!

We want to get as many people as we can to go to the site – so we can raise a bunch of kibble! This is a HUGE opportunity to get more food to shelter pets. So, we would like to ask for your help in spreading the word. Please tell everyone you know to go to www.freekibble.com on Thursday, November 5th! You can also send the e-card (shown below). With your help, we can feed a lot of dogs – they all deserve to be fed a good meal!

My next goal for freekibble.com is to feed as many homeless animals as possible and help to get people inspired to do something good for the world.

Thank you so much!

MIMI