Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi All - Wondering if there's any data tracking on number of foster homes (for dogs in my case but just in general).  Our foster program is growing and its great -- we have way more foster homes than prior years and growth has slowed down but still growing.  Rescues and other shelters are recruiting fosters like crazy and everything you see is "we need foster homes".. but my suspicion is we have SOOOO many more foster homes than say 2019 or pre-pandemic times.   

Given we've never been asked how many foster homes we have and I personally foster for my shelter as well as other organizations.  The focus for most rescue groups is NOT on data collection so likely there's no data available on this... but thought I would put it out there to check. (and see if any study/survey has been done).

My sense is many more people are fostering, which helps for this monumental surge of intake over last year, and that we may be hitting an initial saturation point and have to look for other avenues for foster homes.

#FosterPrograms

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Kathleen Rolinson
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We use Donor Perfect to input all of our training dates for volunteers and fosters. We can run reports yearly, monthly, weekly, etc. So we can in fact capture the data for this to track where we are with new fosters homes as they are onboarded and can compare year-over-year data. We do report to our board annually on the number of new foster homes for that particular year, so it makes it easy to track if we're seeing an uptick in community members becoming fosters. It's really helpful data. 

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Erin Ellis
Community Engagement Director
Humane Society of Truckee-Tahoe

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Foster Program & Volunteer Management Specialist
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Could you share your year over year data? 

Looking to see what growth (or not!?!) others are seeing.  Private email is fine too - krolinson@gmail.com

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Kathleen Rolinson
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-15-2023 09:24 AM
From: ERIN ELLIS
Subject: Counts of Foster homes -- over last few years?

We use Donor Perfect to input all of our training dates for volunteers and fosters. We can run reports yearly, monthly, weekly, etc. So we can in fact capture the data for this to track where we are with new fosters homes as they are onboarded and can compare year-over-year data. We do report to our board annually on the number of new foster homes for that particular year, so it makes it easy to track if we're seeing an uptick in community members becoming fosters. It's really helpful data. 

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Erin Ellis
Community Engagement Director
Humane Society of Truckee-Tahoe

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Foster Program & Volunteer Management Specialist
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