Donate to Keep Jill, Her Partner, and Butch Together

Hello, my name is Jill Norwood and I’m fundraising to have a down payment for a place to live because our tribe, the Tolowa De’eni Nation located in Northern California has decided that a pet policy against having large dogs in our duplex is more important than letting two elders, who are disabled and living in tribal housing designed for the elderly and disabled, keep our beloved dog, Butch, aka Poopy. We love him, he means the world to us and we cannot give him up in order to keep our housing. They gave us a horrible decision to make which was either our dog or our housing. And even though I have a verified diagnosis from a therapist and a letter of support from my doctor prescribing an emotional support dog, and my significant other is on SSDI from years of working as a logger, he is not a service dog and so we are being evicted. After a ten month battle we lost our case in tribal court on September 6, 2024. They gave us 10 days which doesn’t give us much time. To be fair to them this case has been going on for ten months, the entire time we lived in the new home. Maybe I could have handled things better or maybe saved more money but we did the best we could. we’d been homeless for six years. And currently we have no transportation which is a real hardship when you live in a rural setting. To say it’s hard to come back from that and to live a somewhat normal life in less than a ten month timeframe is an understatement and unrealistic. We’ve never been homeless before, never had any problems with law enforcement or been in any kind of trouble. I worked at a museum for 17 years before coming back to my hometown and tribe to retire. I wanted to be closer to my father, who has since died. As have my brother and step mother, and both grandparents. We are alone, which is not uncommon at our age.

The down payment plan: A travel trailer is the best option for living in right now for us because we could afford the payments and housing in our county and the whole area actually has been unaffordable and hard to find for a long time. Used travel trailers that we’ve looked at on RV trader and a variety of rv dealership websites in the area run about $23000 to $40000. A down payment is about 10% of the total cost. To be sure we’d probably only be able to afford and tow something on the $23000 to $35000 range.

Butch means everything to us. He has provided us with so much love and laughter through our hard times and to just turn our backs on him would be confusing and so hurtful for him. We couldn’t live with it. To know he is wondering where we were, and would be waiting for us to come back would be cruel. We haven’t been able to feel at home because he can’t be here with us. So now, I have him here because what else are they going to do to us? And while we are packing things up he’s confused but happy to be with us, he just wants to be with us, and us with him.