Volunteer

Riza runs entirely on volunteers. There's no paid staff behind the feeding schedules, the fence repairs, the 6am medication rounds, the mud, the early mornings before work, or the Saturdays spent building shelters in the sun. Every single one of those hours comes from someone who decided to show up. If you're wondering whether your time would actually matter here, it's the only reason any of this exists at all.

What volunteering actually looks like:
It's rarely glamorous. It's mixing feed, mucking out shelters, hauling water buckets, patching fences that goats have somehow broken again, and learning sixty different personalities well enough to notice when one of them isn't quite right. It's bottle-feeding a kid goat on a strict schedule or sitting with an elderly sheep who just needs company. Some days it's physical work at Quinta da Lameira — digging, building, carrying materials across the land as we prepare it for the animals still waiting to move. Other days it's quieter: grooming, cleaning, just being present.

None of it requires previous experience. What it requires is consistency and care — showing up when you say you will and treating each animal as an individual, not a task on a list.

What you get back
Ask anyone who's spent real time here and they'll tell you the same thing: it changes how you see these animals. Not in an abstract way, "farmed animal" stops being a category and starts being individuals with names, habits, and preferences.

There's also the community. Riza is run by people who came from somewhere else — Italy, the Netherlands, all over — and stayed, or keep coming back, because the people here become as much a reason as the animals. You end up part of something with volunteers who understand exactly why you'd rather spend your Saturday shovelling straw than doing almost anything else.