Animal Welfare Professionals

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

I probably am an outlier from the organizations you've been talking to then! [Maybe due to being a municipal contracted shelter, so we are obligated to take strays and manage intake our surrenders]. We take in an average of 10k animals/year. The majority of our animals that are taken in are strays, not owner surrender (anywhere from 15-20% of our intake is surrender). That being said, when we track the reasons animals are being surrendered our top two reasons are human health emergencies and too many animals (oh how I wish this second one wasn't so!)

 In 2018 we started managed intake and opened up our Pet Resource Center. We have a pet food pantry that gives out thousands of pounds of food per month. We have medical grants that are meant for owner surrender diversion. We utilize home to home and rehoming resources. We also have behavior assistance, low cost care options, limited boarding, and supplies. We help approximately 7,000 animals through that program/year.

Our probably biggest hitting programs are our proactive ones - our care clinic and low-cost spay/neuter. After that we have an animal haven boarding program that allows people having health crisis to board their animals for 30 days as long as they are working with a case worker. This program is our most strained; it's difficult to fund and manage, but it is one of our top requests and given our top surrender reason; is likely the main contributor to keeping animals with their families. After that our medical intervention grants have been very helpful to help keep animals with their owners for those unusual medical emergencies. We have external veterinary partners who help a lot and work with our grants. We also have a vetbilling system that allows us to do care plans which makes a lot of this far more flexible and do-able. Truly the medical team at our shelter is so innovative it gives me hope. 

I think it's really important to really look at the reasons for surrender in each community. There is an Animal Shelter Director in Oklahoma (?) who has an entire fund for paying pet deposits because he felt that was a barrier but then realized he always, always had money in it and that it wasn't as big of a barrier in his community as he thought. So really look at those reasons - and come up with creative solutions and realize the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up.

------------------------------
Rachel Ide
Animal Services Director
Young-Williams Animal Center
TN

Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2026 11:06 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Rachel, thank you for sharing this. What you have built at Young-Williams is exactly the kind of work I am trying to learn from.

Your Pet Resource Center, the medical grants, the Animal Haven boarding program, the food pantry, all of it maps to the same conclusion we came to when we started building Animal-Angels Foundation: the reasons for surrender are specific, solvable problems, not character flaws. Your top surrender reasons being health emergencies and too many animals tells the same story we are seeing in Central Alabama.

Your point about the Oklahoma director and the pet deposit fund is something I think about a lot. We built a micro-grant program for pet deposits because housing barriers came up repeatedly in our community. But you are right that what drives surrender in one community is not the same as the next. That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

I also want to acknowledge something you said that I think gets overlooked: "the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up." That is the truth of this work. No single program solves the problem. But a system of targeted interventions, each one catching a different reason families lose their pets, adds up to real change in intake numbers.

I would love to connect with you outside of this forum if you are open to it. We are building the prevention layer on the community side and your shelter is building it from the inside. Comparing notes could benefit both of us.

BJ Adkins Founder, Animal-Angels Foundation angels@animal-angels.org

I probably am an outlier from the organizations you've been talking to then! [Maybe due to being a municipal contracted shelter, so we are obligated to take strays and manage intake our surrenders]. We take in an average of 10k animals/year. The majority of our animals that are taken in are strays, not owner surrender (anywhere from 15-20% of our intake is surrender). That being said, when we track the reasons animals are being surrendered our top two reasons are human health emergencies and too many animals (oh how I wish this second one wasn't so!)

 In 2018 we started managed intake and opened up our Pet Resource Center. We have a pet food pantry that gives out thousands of pounds of food per month. We have medical grants that are meant for owner surrender diversion. We utilize home to home and rehoming resources. We also have behavior assistance, low cost care options, limited boarding, and supplies. We help approximately 7,000 animals through that program/year.

Our probably biggest hitting programs are our proactive ones - our care clinic and low-cost spay/neuter. After that we have an animal haven boarding program that allows people having health crisis to board their animals for 30 days as long as they are working with a case worker. This program is our most strained; it's difficult to fund and manage, but it is one of our top requests and given our top surrender reason; is likely the main contributor to keeping animals with their families. After that our medical intervention grants have been very helpful to help keep animals with their owners for those unusual medical emergencies. We have external veterinary partners who help a lot and work with our grants. We also have a vetbilling system that allows us to do care plans which makes a lot of this far more flexible and do-able. Truly the medical team at our shelter is so innovative it gives me hope. 

I think it's really important to really look at the reasons for surrender in each community. There is an Animal Shelter Director in Oklahoma (?) who has an entire fund for paying pet deposits because he felt that was a barrier but then realized he always, always had money in it and that it wasn't as big of a barrier in his community as he thought. So really look at those reasons - and come up with creative solutions and realize the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up.

------------------------------
Rachel Ide
Animal Services Director
Young-Williams Animal Center
TN

Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2026 11:06 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Hi, BJ,

Could you share more about the paragraph below that you posted earlier? I'm curious what this looks like.

That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

Rachel, thank you for sharing this. What you have built at Young-Williams is exactly the kind of work I am trying to learn from.

Your Pet Resource Center, the medical grants, the Animal Haven boarding program, the food pantry, all of it maps to the same conclusion we came to when we started building Animal-Angels Foundation: the reasons for surrender are specific, solvable problems, not character flaws. Your top surrender reasons being health emergencies and too many animals tells the same story we are seeing in Central Alabama.

Your point about the Oklahoma director and the pet deposit fund is something I think about a lot. We built a micro-grant program for pet deposits because housing barriers came up repeatedly in our community. But you are right that what drives surrender in one community is not the same as the next. That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

I also want to acknowledge something you said that I think gets overlooked: "the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up." That is the truth of this work. No single program solves the problem. But a system of targeted interventions, each one catching a different reason families lose their pets, adds up to real change in intake numbers.

I would love to connect with you outside of this forum if you are open to it. We are building the prevention layer on the community side and your shelter is building it from the inside. Comparing notes could benefit both of us.

BJ Adkins Founder, Animal-Angels Foundation angels@animal-angels.org

I probably am an outlier from the organizations you've been talking to then! [Maybe due to being a municipal contracted shelter, so we are obligated to take strays and manage intake our surrenders]. We take in an average of 10k animals/year. The majority of our animals that are taken in are strays, not owner surrender (anywhere from 15-20% of our intake is surrender). That being said, when we track the reasons animals are being surrendered our top two reasons are human health emergencies and too many animals (oh how I wish this second one wasn't so!)

 In 2018 we started managed intake and opened up our Pet Resource Center. We have a pet food pantry that gives out thousands of pounds of food per month. We have medical grants that are meant for owner surrender diversion. We utilize home to home and rehoming resources. We also have behavior assistance, low cost care options, limited boarding, and supplies. We help approximately 7,000 animals through that program/year.

Our probably biggest hitting programs are our proactive ones - our care clinic and low-cost spay/neuter. After that we have an animal haven boarding program that allows people having health crisis to board their animals for 30 days as long as they are working with a case worker. This program is our most strained; it's difficult to fund and manage, but it is one of our top requests and given our top surrender reason; is likely the main contributor to keeping animals with their families. After that our medical intervention grants have been very helpful to help keep animals with their owners for those unusual medical emergencies. We have external veterinary partners who help a lot and work with our grants. We also have a vetbilling system that allows us to do care plans which makes a lot of this far more flexible and do-able. Truly the medical team at our shelter is so innovative it gives me hope. 

I think it's really important to really look at the reasons for surrender in each community. There is an Animal Shelter Director in Oklahoma (?) who has an entire fund for paying pet deposits because he felt that was a barrier but then realized he always, always had money in it and that it wasn't as big of a barrier in his community as he thought. So really look at those reasons - and come up with creative solutions and realize the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up.

------------------------------
Rachel Ide
Animal Services Director
Young-Williams Animal Center
TN

Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2026 11:06 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Augusta, great question. Here is what that looked like for us.

Before we designed any programs, we needed to understand why animals were entering shelters in our seven counties, not just how many. The national data gives you broad categories: owner surrender, stray, transfer, cruelty, return. But those categories hide the real story.

Take "stray" intake. National data shows 30 to 40% of shelter intake falls under that label. But studies from large municipal shelters show that 40 to 60% of dogs labeled stray are reclaimed by owners. That means a huge portion of "strays" are not homeless animals. They are lost pets, housing displacement, storm escapes, people who could not afford reclaim fees. Some are what shelter workers call "unofficial surrenders," where the owner says "I found this dog" because the alternative is admitting they cannot keep it.

So we started pulling that thread.

We looked at what was driving surrender in Central Alabama specifically. Financial crisis. Housing barriers (pet deposits, breed restrictions, landlord policy changes). Unplanned litters in areas with limited spay/neuter access. Behavior problems that families could not afford to address. Medical costs that exceeded what a family could absorb. And we talked to shelter workers and rescue operators in our region and beyond about what they were seeing on the ground.

What came back was a consistent pattern. Every shelter was doing some version of prevention: food banks, vaccine clinics, behavior helplines, supply giveaways, short-term boarding. But they were all doing it in isolation, with limited capacity, and without a connected system. A shelter worker in western North Carolina described five specific barriers that cause their prevention efforts to fail: callback delays of 2 to 5 days (by which time the owner has already surrendered), vouchers that do not cover enough, housing accounting for roughly 40% of their surrenders with no tools to address it from the shelter side, people who have struggled too long without help reaching the "done with it" stage, and capacity collapse when surrounding shelters suspend intake.

Every one of those barriers mapped to a gap we could fill with a specific program.

Callback delays? Pet Help Desk provides same-day triage by phone. Voucher limits? The Bridge goes beyond capped vouchers with direct emergency support: food, gas, medical, grooming. Housing barriers? Pet Deposit Bridge covers pet deposits through micro-grants. Unplanned litters? SNIP provides free spay/neuter with a completion stipend. Behavior problems? Foster-to-Train pairs animals with foster homes where they get training before adoption.

But the mapping did not stop at program design. We needed a way to keep reading the terrain in real time. That is where the Pet Crisis Radar came from. It is an automated monitoring system that scans Reddit and Facebook for families in Central Alabama showing early signs of pet crisis. We built a keyword engine with 50+ crisis phrases scored 1 to 5 by urgency, covering five categories: housing, financial, behavior, life change, and general distress. The system runs every 15 minutes through automated scanning. When a post matches, it gets flagged, scored, and logged in our Airtable tracker with the urgency level, crisis type, county, matched keywords, and which program referral fits. We track every case from first contact through resolution.

So when someone posts "my landlord just told me I have 30 days to get rid of my dog" or "I can't afford this vet bill and I don't know what to do," we see it. And we respond before the shelter does.

The Radar is doing two things at once. It is finding families who need help right now. And it is giving us ongoing data about what the actual crisis patterns look like in our service area, which keeps the mapping current. The reasons people lose pets shift. Housing pressure increases. Vet costs spike. New barriers emerge. The Radar catches those shifts as they happen instead of us finding out six months later in a shelter report.

That is what we mean by mapping pathways to intake. We did not start with "let's build a spay/neuter program." We started with "what are the actual reasons animals are entering shelters in our service area, and which of those reasons are preventable if someone intervenes before the shelter door?" Then we built each program to plug a specific hole. And then we built the monitoring system to keep finding those holes in real time.

The other piece that came out of the mapping was that the gaps are not just programmatic. They are structural. The resources exist in most communities. They are just not connected. A shelter has a food bank but cannot help with vet bills. A rescue covers vet bills but cannot help with housing. Nobody talks to each other. That is why we built the AWRN (Animal Welfare Resource Network) as the connective layer. Every partner connects to every other partner, not just through us.

Prevention is not one program. It is a system. And you cannot design the system until you map the actual terrain.


Bj 

Hi, BJ,

Could you share more about the paragraph below that you posted earlier? I'm curious what this looks like.

That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

Rachel, thank you for sharing this. What you have built at Young-Williams is exactly the kind of work I am trying to learn from.

Your Pet Resource Center, the medical grants, the Animal Haven boarding program, the food pantry, all of it maps to the same conclusion we came to when we started building Animal-Angels Foundation: the reasons for surrender are specific, solvable problems, not character flaws. Your top surrender reasons being health emergencies and too many animals tells the same story we are seeing in Central Alabama.

Your point about the Oklahoma director and the pet deposit fund is something I think about a lot. We built a micro-grant program for pet deposits because housing barriers came up repeatedly in our community. But you are right that what drives surrender in one community is not the same as the next. That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

I also want to acknowledge something you said that I think gets overlooked: "the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up." That is the truth of this work. No single program solves the problem. But a system of targeted interventions, each one catching a different reason families lose their pets, adds up to real change in intake numbers.

I would love to connect with you outside of this forum if you are open to it. We are building the prevention layer on the community side and your shelter is building it from the inside. Comparing notes could benefit both of us.

BJ Adkins Founder, Animal-Angels Foundation angels@animal-angels.org

I probably am an outlier from the organizations you've been talking to then! [Maybe due to being a municipal contracted shelter, so we are obligated to take strays and manage intake our surrenders]. We take in an average of 10k animals/year. The majority of our animals that are taken in are strays, not owner surrender (anywhere from 15-20% of our intake is surrender). That being said, when we track the reasons animals are being surrendered our top two reasons are human health emergencies and too many animals (oh how I wish this second one wasn't so!)

 In 2018 we started managed intake and opened up our Pet Resource Center. We have a pet food pantry that gives out thousands of pounds of food per month. We have medical grants that are meant for owner surrender diversion. We utilize home to home and rehoming resources. We also have behavior assistance, low cost care options, limited boarding, and supplies. We help approximately 7,000 animals through that program/year.

Our probably biggest hitting programs are our proactive ones - our care clinic and low-cost spay/neuter. After that we have an animal haven boarding program that allows people having health crisis to board their animals for 30 days as long as they are working with a case worker. This program is our most strained; it's difficult to fund and manage, but it is one of our top requests and given our top surrender reason; is likely the main contributor to keeping animals with their families. After that our medical intervention grants have been very helpful to help keep animals with their owners for those unusual medical emergencies. We have external veterinary partners who help a lot and work with our grants. We also have a vetbilling system that allows us to do care plans which makes a lot of this far more flexible and do-able. Truly the medical team at our shelter is so innovative it gives me hope. 

I think it's really important to really look at the reasons for surrender in each community. There is an Animal Shelter Director in Oklahoma (?) who has an entire fund for paying pet deposits because he felt that was a barrier but then realized he always, always had money in it and that it wasn't as big of a barrier in his community as he thought. So really look at those reasons - and come up with creative solutions and realize the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up.

------------------------------
Rachel Ide
Animal Services Director
Young-Williams Animal Center
TN

Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2026 11:06 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

BJ

What you shared is amazing detail that drill down to address real-time need, not imagined. Are you able to share your platforms or when are you going to roll out nationally?

I'm going to share with some local folks. We too find there is not enough communication among all the stakeholders.

Augusta

------------------------------
Augusta Farley

Original Message:
Sent: 03-20-2026 10:54 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

Augusta, great question. Here is what that looked like for us.

Before we designed any programs, we needed to understand why animals were entering shelters in our seven counties, not just how many. The national data gives you broad categories: owner surrender, stray, transfer, cruelty, return. But those categories hide the real story.

Take "stray" intake. National data shows 30 to 40% of shelter intake falls under that label. But studies from large municipal shelters show that 40 to 60% of dogs labeled stray are reclaimed by owners. That means a huge portion of "strays" are not homeless animals. They are lost pets, housing displacement, storm escapes, people who could not afford reclaim fees. Some are what shelter workers call "unofficial surrenders," where the owner says "I found this dog" because the alternative is admitting they cannot keep it.

So we started pulling that thread.

We looked at what was driving surrender in Central Alabama specifically. Financial crisis. Housing barriers (pet deposits, breed restrictions, landlord policy changes). Unplanned litters in areas with limited spay/neuter access. Behavior problems that families could not afford to address. Medical costs that exceeded what a family could absorb. And we talked to shelter workers and rescue operators in our region and beyond about what they were seeing on the ground.

What came back was a consistent pattern. Every shelter was doing some version of prevention: food banks, vaccine clinics, behavior helplines, supply giveaways, short-term boarding. But they were all doing it in isolation, with limited capacity, and without a connected system. A shelter worker in western North Carolina described five specific barriers that cause their prevention efforts to fail: callback delays of 2 to 5 days (by which time the owner has already surrendered), vouchers that do not cover enough, housing accounting for roughly 40% of their surrenders with no tools to address it from the shelter side, people who have struggled too long without help reaching the "done with it" stage, and capacity collapse when surrounding shelters suspend intake.

Every one of those barriers mapped to a gap we could fill with a specific program.

Callback delays? Pet Help Desk provides same-day triage by phone. Voucher limits? The Bridge goes beyond capped vouchers with direct emergency support: food, gas, medical, grooming. Housing barriers? Pet Deposit Bridge covers pet deposits through micro-grants. Unplanned litters? SNIP provides free spay/neuter with a completion stipend. Behavior problems? Foster-to-Train pairs animals with foster homes where they get training before adoption.

But the mapping did not stop at program design. We needed a way to keep reading the terrain in real time. That is where the Pet Crisis Radar came from. It is an automated monitoring system that scans Reddit and Facebook for families in Central Alabama showing early signs of pet crisis. We built a keyword engine with 50+ crisis phrases scored 1 to 5 by urgency, covering five categories: housing, financial, behavior, life change, and general distress. The system runs every 15 minutes through automated scanning. When a post matches, it gets flagged, scored, and logged in our Airtable tracker with the urgency level, crisis type, county, matched keywords, and which program referral fits. We track every case from first contact through resolution.

So when someone posts "my landlord just told me I have 30 days to get rid of my dog" or "I can't afford this vet bill and I don't know what to do," we see it. And we respond before the shelter does.

The Radar is doing two things at once. It is finding families who need help right now. And it is giving us ongoing data about what the actual crisis patterns look like in our service area, which keeps the mapping current. The reasons people lose pets shift. Housing pressure increases. Vet costs spike. New barriers emerge. The Radar catches those shifts as they happen instead of us finding out six months later in a shelter report.

That is what we mean by mapping pathways to intake. We did not start with "let's build a spay/neuter program." We started with "what are the actual reasons animals are entering shelters in our service area, and which of those reasons are preventable if someone intervenes before the shelter door?" Then we built each program to plug a specific hole. And then we built the monitoring system to keep finding those holes in real time.

The other piece that came out of the mapping was that the gaps are not just programmatic. They are structural. The resources exist in most communities. They are just not connected. A shelter has a food bank but cannot help with vet bills. A rescue covers vet bills but cannot help with housing. Nobody talks to each other. That is why we built the AWRN (Animal Welfare Resource Network) as the connective layer. Every partner connects to every other partner, not just through us.

Prevention is not one program. It is a system. And you cannot design the system until you map the actual terrain.


Bj 

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org

Original Message:
Sent: 03-20-2026 07:23 AM
From: Augusta Farley (She/Her)
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

Hi, BJ,

Could you share more about the paragraph below that you posted earlier? I'm curious what this looks like.

That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

------------------------------
Augusta Farley

Original Message:
Sent: 03-19-2026 09:55 AM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

Rachel, thank you for sharing this. What you have built at Young-Williams is exactly the kind of work I am trying to learn from.

Your Pet Resource Center, the medical grants, the Animal Haven boarding program, the food pantry, all of it maps to the same conclusion we came to when we started building Animal-Angels Foundation: the reasons for surrender are specific, solvable problems, not character flaws. Your top surrender reasons being health emergencies and too many animals tells the same story we are seeing in Central Alabama.

Your point about the Oklahoma director and the pet deposit fund is something I think about a lot. We built a micro-grant program for pet deposits because housing barriers came up repeatedly in our community. But you are right that what drives surrender in one community is not the same as the next. That is why we started by mapping the actual pathways to intake in our seven-county service area before we designed programs around them.

I also want to acknowledge something you said that I think gets overlooked: "the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up." That is the truth of this work. No single program solves the problem. But a system of targeted interventions, each one catching a different reason families lose their pets, adds up to real change in intake numbers.

I would love to connect with you outside of this forum if you are open to it. We are building the prevention layer on the community side and your shelter is building it from the inside. Comparing notes could benefit both of us.

BJ Adkins Founder, Animal-Angels Foundation angels@animal-angels.org

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org

Original Message:
Sent: 03-18-2026 05:29 AM
From: Rachel Ide
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

I probably am an outlier from the organizations you've been talking to then! [Maybe due to being a municipal contracted shelter, so we are obligated to take strays and manage intake our surrenders]. We take in an average of 10k animals/year. The majority of our animals that are taken in are strays, not owner surrender (anywhere from 15-20% of our intake is surrender). That being said, when we track the reasons animals are being surrendered our top two reasons are human health emergencies and too many animals (oh how I wish this second one wasn't so!)

 In 2018 we started managed intake and opened up our Pet Resource Center. We have a pet food pantry that gives out thousands of pounds of food per month. We have medical grants that are meant for owner surrender diversion. We utilize home to home and rehoming resources. We also have behavior assistance, low cost care options, limited boarding, and supplies. We help approximately 7,000 animals through that program/year.

Our probably biggest hitting programs are our proactive ones - our care clinic and low-cost spay/neuter. After that we have an animal haven boarding program that allows people having health crisis to board their animals for 30 days as long as they are working with a case worker. This program is our most strained; it's difficult to fund and manage, but it is one of our top requests and given our top surrender reason; is likely the main contributor to keeping animals with their families. After that our medical intervention grants have been very helpful to help keep animals with their owners for those unusual medical emergencies. We have external veterinary partners who help a lot and work with our grants. We also have a vetbilling system that allows us to do care plans which makes a lot of this far more flexible and do-able. Truly the medical team at our shelter is so innovative it gives me hope. 

I think it's really important to really look at the reasons for surrender in each community. There is an Animal Shelter Director in Oklahoma (?) who has an entire fund for paying pet deposits because he felt that was a barrier but then realized he always, always had money in it and that it wasn't as big of a barrier in his community as he thought. So really look at those reasons - and come up with creative solutions and realize the creative solutions may not be a silver bullet that fixes everything but maybe just helps. A little here, a little there and the differences add up.

------------------------------
Rachel Ide
Animal Services Director
Young-Williams Animal Center
TN

Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2026 11:06 PM
From: Bj Adkins
Subject: I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually doing about prevention?

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Interesting that you are concerned about this and live in Alabama.  I've run a cat rescue in TN for 23 years and I would say that local government's unwillingness to pass and enforce spay/neuter laws in the South, where much is based upon the phrase "don't intefer with my right to do anything I want" is pretty common.  Prevention is not having the litter of cats or dogs born, not permitting breeders to breed animals in horrible conditions, giving rural county shelters enough budget and a clean, modern facility to help  care for and find homes for animals who come into their care.  The cats we rescue DO NOT stay in TN, they are transported to parts of the US where these kinds of laws and attention to animal needs ARE met and thus there is a need for sweet rescues to fulfill the demand for companion animals.  Maybe you need to start with getting the State of Alabama and your local city council on board with some serious laws to help prevent over-population, abuse and out-of-control breeders.  

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Interesting that you are concerned about this and live in Alabama.  I've run a cat rescue in TN for 23 years and I would say that local government's unwillingness to pass and enforce spay/neuter laws in the South, where much is based upon the phrase "don't intefer with my right to do anything I want" is pretty common.  Prevention is not having the litter of cats or dogs born, not permitting breeders to breed animals in horrible conditions, giving rural county shelters enough budget and a clean, modern facility to help  care for and find homes for animals who come into their care.  The cats we rescue DO NOT stay in TN, they are transported to parts of the US where these kinds of laws and attention to animal needs ARE met and thus there is a need for sweet rescues to fulfill the demand for companion animals.  Maybe you need to start with getting the State of Alabama and your local city council on board with some serious laws to help prevent over-population, abuse and out-of-control breeders.  

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------

Interesting that you are concerned about this and live in Alabama.  I've run a cat rescue in TN for 23 years and I would say that local government's unwillingness to pass and enforce spay/neuter laws in the South, where much is based upon the phrase "don't intefer with my right to do anything I want" is pretty common.  Prevention is not having the litter of cats or dogs born, not permitting breeders to breed animals in horrible conditions, giving rural county shelters enough budget and a clean, modern facility to help  care for and find homes for animals who come into their care.  The cats we rescue DO NOT stay in TN, they are transported to parts of the US where these kinds of laws and attention to animal needs ARE met and thus there is a need for sweet rescues to fulfill the demand for companion animals.  Maybe you need to start with getting the State of Alabama and your local city council on board with some serious laws to help prevent over-population, abuse and out-of-control breeders.  

What are we actually doing about prevention?

Not what we say we're doing. Not "community outreach" as a line item on a grant report. I mean real, structured intervention before an animal ever hits a shelter door.

I talk to shelter directors who tell me 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of their intake is owner surrender. And when you dig into why, it's almost always something that could have been solved. A pet deposit the family couldn't cover. A landlord who said no. A vet bill that snowballed. A behavioral issue nobody helped with early enough.

We built an entire system around what happens after surrender. Intake, foster, transfer, adopt, repeat. And that system is full of brilliant, exhausted people doing incredible work. But I don't see nearly enough conversation about what happens before.

So I'm asking. What does prevention look like where you are? Is anyone running diversion programs that are actually working? Family retention? Crisis intervention before it becomes a surrender? What's getting funded, what's not, and what are you seeing that gives you hope or keeps you up at night?

I'd love to hear what's real, not what's polished for a conference slide.

#PetSupportServices*

------------------------------
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
------------------------------