Animal Welfare Professionals

Have you implemented intake reduction and/or mitigation strategies -- e.g. managed intake & safety net programming? If so, do you have any data regarding budget impacts? We are trying to learn more about the savings or costs associated with these programs, and would LOVE any information you might have.

Thanks so much!

Our rescue has been doing surrender prevention for 8 years, since we formed.  We work with owners to help them keep their pets.  Could mean vetting assist, s/n assist, building or repairing a fence, providing food..... you name it.    It works, and it's very rewarding.  We have helped a lot (over 1000) animals stay in their homes.  The "downside" is that it's a one-way street, regarding funds.  No adoption fee (which of course never cover costs, but do help a bit). 

Initially, it was very difficult to get any grants for surrender prevention, as most of the big grantors were focussed on programs that took animals who were already in kill shelters.  Hardly anyone was doing surrender prevention.  But happily, finally, we are seeing some shift now, to recognizing the benefits of preventing pets from entering a shelter in the first place.  There is a slow increase in the number of grants available for surrender prevention/intake reduction programs.    We are hoping more and more grantors start to see the benefit.  

We are a small organization.  An excellent example of a much larger organization that has been doing surrender prevention for some time is Chicago Humane.  They are incredible.   

Working with owners, we get to establish a good relationship with them.  For example, they may call us for help with food.  Ok, great, is your dog up to date on vacs and spayed?  No?  Well, we would like to help you with that.  Maybe they call for help with a fence.  Same questions are asked and help is offered.  The benefit?  Dog stays in the home, gets the vetting he/she needs, and is spayed/neutered.  

Yes, it's expensive.  But as I said, more grants are becoming available.  And with regard to donations, it's appealing to people to help dogs and cats stay in their homes.  People want to be a part of keeping animals out of shelters, not just getting them out of shelters.  

We also specialize in working directly with folks who have/found a pet they absolutely cannot keep.  We offer all the support that is needed to get that pet ready for adoption, and that is often enough to encourage the person to foster the pet till adopted.  So the pet never enters a shelter.  He/she goes from home to home, which is a MUCH better outcome than being brought to a shelter, and hoping that the pet gets adopted or taken by a rescue.

We are in south Louisiana, and we have a disgustingly high kill rate in most of the municipal shelters.  Going into a shelter (I'm not talking about no-kill shelters/rescues) is a very very bad option for pets here.    It is our firm belief that preventing them from entering shelters in the first place is a key to reducing the number of homeless and at-risk pets.  

I have our data from over the years, if you're interested.    Thank you for this question! 

Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. As we start putting together data on this, I'll definitely keep you in mind. Most of my thinking about this is from the standpoint of a given municipality. However, we certainly know that these things take a whole community to address and organizations like your are vital. It will be interesting to factor that into the budget discussions for sure. Thanks again!

Hello! I am the Safety Net Resource Coordinator at Nashville Humane. Would you be able to share foundation links/names of the grants you applied to for pet retention/surrender prevention funding? I have been trying to locate more funding for our Saftey Net program but as you mentioned this is difficult to find. Also, I'd love to know what your pleas/narratives look like when asking the public for donations. Do you feel they're more responsive to monetary asks or supply donations?

One of the big mysteries to me in sheltering was that when shelter per-capita intake plunged in the years from 1970 to 2000, it doesn't appear that the number of live releases increased much during that time. It was almost like a certain level of intake decline had to be reached before shelters felt that they had the capacity to invest more in lifesaving. So I'm wondering if the answer to your question would depend on where the shelter is starting from in terms of intake per thousand people. Or, to put it more clearly, are shelters better able to leverage cost savings from intake reduction if they are functioning pretty well to start with?

Good thought Susan -- and definitely something to consider. I agree, it does seem to be the case that intake and euthanasia mirror each other nearly directly. That's why intake mitigation is so important. And -- certainly -- we will definitely keep the per capita intake/outcomes in mind as we start to put this together. That's an important factor, for sure! Thanks for taking the time!

We also find that private donations can be negatively impacted when we focus on programs other than direct rescue--i.e., other than intaking, rehabbing, and then homing animals. Unfortunately, the general public still is often compelled to help by that sort of work, especially when photos are involved.  We have to work harder so that people appreciate the value of the other aspects of rescue.

Just to add an "interesting" comment on the general topic and what SSAS has said in his/her comment...We are a very small, all volunteer organization in central AZ that focuses exclusively on providing free access to spay/neuter and a free pet food bank. We very, very rarely receive ANY public donations, and struggle to secure grant funding. It is still very true-at least in this area- that the public is largely uninterested in directly supporting intake prevention/pet overpopulation reduction strategies...it seems they fail to make any sort of connection between what we do and the number of pets in our open admission shelters. We struggle to drive people to our Facebook page (we don't usually have any "cute fuzzies" pictures)-I just recently added some Pinterest boards on topics like spay/neuter, pet welfare, fun animal pins, etc in an attempt to provide some "interesting" content...it's tough going and pretty discouraging. 

If I could offer some suggestions to you Jazzkat, One thing to consider is knowing that EVERY time you post is an advertisement!   I went to your Best Friends page and I still dont know who you are, and I thought I knew all the food pantry's in Arizona, (since we are one too).  But if you go to mine you will seee our name in the description. Now if you go to our page, emptybowlpetfoodpantry.org which is a go daddy wysiwyg page.  The left side top is for clients help. The central and left are for donations and volunteers.  Notice that we have gotten platinum status at guidestar.org and that we weren't in a hurry to get to that status.  We had our communities help us each step, focusing on one level from Jan-April and the next from Sept-Dec.  Celebrating each step with our audiences.  We also used Greater Non-profits (I need to get on that for this year) for positive reviews of our work!.  You see, a few years ago, the IRS changed from having non -profits vet them selves, to having donors, vet their donation sources or risk having the IRS deny their donation as deductible.  So now, more and more  donation sources sit down with applications for grants and check with guidestar to see their status. (Guidestar gets reports directly from the IRS on status and 990s)  So any agency not keeping their records on guidestar generally go straight to the trash, as a culling for risk management for the grantor!  Then they start looking at the programs of what is left.

You say you are in central AZ. Is that the Valley of the Sun? Do you know there are at least 500 animal non-profits here?  

How do you make your self different?  More and more funding is going to agencies that know how to collaborate.  We work with so many agency's and people love our business model!  We are clear that we help people trying to get on their feet.  Therefore we work with other agencies helping humans that have the same client priority that vet their clients so we don't have to.  That means we are not enabling behavior of people who prefer to live off the system we are helping thousands of people's pets, and not worrying who is getting our pet food and idems that don't deserve it!

We discovered that Grantors keep putting us in competition with rescues that have animals - we dont.  So we have been re-branding to point out our contributions as building community and individual resiliency, We also had over 1000 members who were "special needs groups wanting disaster preparedness for their needs so we formed a new division we call "America, RU prepared" and Empty Bowl Pet food Pantry is becoming a division as well.  A corporate pain, I admit, but when we become "Animals (and Humans) in Disaster, Inc it will be worth it.

We already had a DBA as Animals in Disaster for our FEMA.gov group inside the 501c3. We added Humans, instead of People, because we want to focus  of the humanity of what we do, instead of the faceless people cared for of so many agencies.  (Work with Az corp commission is done and as soon as they process our changes, we can notify the IRS).

We also found a niche, (besides our agency work), of focusing on evacuation for the early stages of disaster, and the hours before government responds. which we also are a part of.  So we are in a community for al three areas of disaster response. Pre-gov, gov, and after the government leaves.

Hope this gives you a few ideas! 

Thanks for the comments. Pets In Need Action League ("my" non-profit) serves financially disadvantaged clients (we pre-qualify so as to provide "high value" services to those most in need) providing both free pet food and free spay/neuter. We are in Pinal County, a much less resource-rich setting, unfortunately, than is Maricopa county where animal welfare is concerned (and MCACC alone intakes in the 5 digits each year, even with the many and varied resources and groups operating up there!) We are a group of 5 volunteers doing what we do in a "veterinary desert" (to borrow a phrase from the HSUS), where a high %age of residents are at or below the federally established poverty level, a high %age are non-English speakers or Native American, and a host of other complex demographic issues (such as the fact that a large proportion of our population consists of winter visitors, who sometimes seem to lack the same sort of commitment to and engagement with the issues in a given area that permanent residents exhibit.) This said, we have distributed more than 28,000# of pet food since 2014, and have provided more than 900 free spay/neuter surgeries. 99% of our revenue goes to directly support our programs-so we are justifiably, I think, proud of what we have been able to accomplish, especially as we are the ONLY non-profit of its kind in this county.

We do work with social service agencies, faith-based groups, etc to spread the word on our services. We have a difficult time getting volunteers in this area, also (and I also saw this to be the case from my past employment as the volunteer manager for the county AC shelter), so 90 % of what we do is done by a very small core group of people.

We have a website; we are on Facebook, we have added Pinterest to our FB page (for color and interest purposes), so we are doing what we can to keep ourselves "out there." (There are fewer than FOUR pet animal related non-profits down here, BTW, of which we are one.) We, too, are on Guidestar-Bronze level-we have only been "official" since 2013, and our first full year of activity was 2014.

So-quite a contrast to Maricopa or Pima Counties. We (as an organization) have talked with Empty Bowls in the past, BTW, but never got to the point of developing a collaborative relationship. I know the major players in Maricopa County animal welfare, and recently met with the AZ Pet Project to discuss collaboration-as their mission, intake prevention-is very similar to our own. The majority of our revenue has come from grants to date; however, as we all know, competition is fierce, so there are never any guarantees of grant funding...and fundraising is yet another area our 5-person volunteer base simply hasn't had the time to take on.

My original point, however, was that a group like mine tends to be overlooked when the public thinks about donating, as we don't have the animal pictures that are so attention grabbing and tend to tug at people's heartstrings. Info on euthanasia rates in shelters, pictures of a spay/neuter mobile or clients picking up pet food at a distribution, etc., just doesn't have the same kind of emotional appeal for a lot of people.

All this said-I am all for collaboration! Congrats to your organization for its achievements, as well. We are all in this together, after all.

Agreed, jazzcat!  When you are doing surrender prevention, as your and my organizations do, it is often very difficult to get donations, as these are owned pets, not pets in a shelter setting.  It takes some education to get people to understand that if we don't help each other (i.e. help people who are struggling), those pets WILL be in a shelter or worse.  I've started referring to them as "at-risk" pets, in publications, posts, etc.    

I am right there with you, when you talk about the emotional appeal of pet food distribution, etc (except, of course, when there is a hurricane or flood, then it makes the news - but we do pet food assistance year round.    ).   Hopefully some of the larger organizations will start to get on board more with surrender prevention and intake reduction, in a bigger way.  Just like preventative health care, it is ALWAYS better and more cost-effective to prevent a problem than to try to correct it.  While promoting s/n and adoption are of course wonderful and vital, they obviously haven't done the trick to get to no kill.