About Us

The two animal lovers combined forces and together they started an organization (FSI). Ioannis started a shelter near the Bramiana dam Lake in Ierapetra, now known as Jutta shelter. Jutta started one in Pilalimata near Sitia.
Since that day they have been able to help thousands of animals, mostly dogs and cats, that were in immediate need of help. They offered food and water to stray animals in many areas of Ierapetra and Sitia. Together with volunteer veterinarians they started neutering programs and immediately started adoption campaigns. After all, every animal deserves a loving, caring, happy and secure home.
Despite the opening of the Animal Welfare Association all the problems of the many stray animals continued and their financial situation worsened.
Due to urgent health problems Jutta had to go back to Germany and Ioannis had to gather all their rescued animals in order to accommodate them all in one shelter.
Jutta shelter in Ierapetra, was named in loving memory of Jutta, who was still setting up adoptions till her very last days. She sadly passed away in Germany, November 2018.

From that moment on Ioannis was on his own, trying to do the best he could but with more animals and smaller finances it was very difficult for him to combine his work in the shelter, his animal welfare involvement and having a fulltime job,.
Ioannis and Jutta were using all their income on the animals and Ioannis continued to do so.
Jutta shelter was in serious need of funds and volunteers!
Friends came to help and gave the shelter more social media exposure, the creation of a Facebook page, a YouTube page and now also a website to tell the story of Jutta shelter.

Volunteers came to visite Jutta shelter and they offered to manage the Jutta shelter Facebook account and began to post all the daily news. They also posted adorable videos and all of a sudden everybody involved became part of the Jutta family!
Jutta shelter is getting a lot of support and visits from its online followers which Ioannis fondly refers to as Jutta family. They can save more and more souls which is urgently needed as the problems with the stray animals is still very bad.
Jutta shelter will do everything they can to save all these beautiful souls twenty four seven all year round. Despite the hardest time for the stray animals is in the winter because there are hardly any tourists on the island, so nobody is feeding the animals which means they will starve to dead. For the shelter this means more rescue actions, more mouths to feed, more animals in the shelter!

The shelter has now 15000 square meters of land where over 200 dogs and 50 cats are living and it’s animal population is still growing fast. We do our best to give them a safe place of comfort but every animal needs a loving home. So we want to expand our adoption campaign. Also our education campaign to better inform people about animals being sentient beings and hopefully change their mindset about animals in generality and how they are treated. Because the problem with the strays is so big we strongly believe that starting spay and neutering campaigns is top priority. Our philosophy is that this will solve a major problem and it is the only way to make a permanent change.

Jutta shelter receives no help from the authorities and relies only on donations.
We need your help! Will you become a member of our Jutta family?
Each one of us can make a difference and together we can make a change!

All animals deserve a beautiful life!