Animal Welfare Professionals

Myself,  @Clare Callison and @Luis Quintanilla had the opportunity to join a panel during Camp Maddie: Foster Edition on December 7th, called Fosters Welcome: Low-Barrier Onboarding for High Community Engagement.

If you haven’t yet seen it, the recording is available here. If you were in the audience, thank you so much for your time!!

We discussed strategies on how to make it easy for your community to become foster caregivers, and the benefits, like increased foster caregiver recruitment, increasing diversity within your foster base, and saving you time.

We started a great conversation then, but there were many questions we didn’t have time to get to. We’ll be posting those unanswered questions in the comments on this thread so keep an eye out for responses to all of those. Please let me know if you have any additional questions and let’s keep the conversation going!

Do you all use an application process for open fostering? Example: Walk-in fosters?

Yes we do. We utilize shelterluv for our application process so they can do the app from anywhere. If they come in the office we can help them via their phone, a computer or we do have our application on paper too. We want to make sure we are as accommodating as possible. Our application is very simple and streamlined. 

For long term fostering do you require fosters personal pets to be altered and up to date on vaccines? Would you consider this a barrier?

Do you ever go to the homes to check on their home conditions?

With short term foster care, how can I convince my shelter to allow members of the public to participate? Only our volunteers at the highest tier of training are allowed to do it currently.

What type of information do you require from the people you're onboarding as foster parents? Currently we require them to provide a criminal record check, and the vaccination records for their pets. I'm all for reducing barriers, but a piece of me feels these are non-negotiables. I'm curious what other shelters do! :)