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  • 1.  I'm writing a book about prevention programs. I need your failures more than your wins.

    Posted 05-05-2026 11:32 PM

    I'm writing a book about prevention programs. I need your failures more than your wins.


    Quick context. I'm wrapping up "The Shift to Prevention," a guide for the field on why upstream work has to become the standard, not the exception. That one's almost done.


    The next project is bigger, and I can't write it alone.
    I'm starting a book that catalogs prevention programs that have actually been tried in the field. Every kind. Pet food pantries. Pet deposit assistance. Behavior helplines. Vet care subsidies. Landlord mediation. Community cat programs. Crisis fostering. Owner-requested rehoming support. All of it.


    For each program, I want three things. What you tried. What worked. What didn't.


    The wins are useful. We'll learn from those. But the part the field actually needs, the part nobody publishes, is the failures. The pilot that ran out of money in month four. The partnership that fell apart. The intake form nobody filled out. The grant that funded the wrong piece. The evaluation framework that measured nothing useful. The well-designed program that died because one staff person left.


    We don't share that stuff. We share the photos and the numbers that look good in the annual report. Which means every prevention program in this country is reinventing the same mistakes in private.


    I want to change that.


    If you've run a prevention program, in any capacity, at any scale, I want to hear from you. Successful, failed, half-built, abandoned, still running and limping.

    Doesn't matter. The honest version is what I'm after.
    You can comment here. You can message me. If you want to be quoted by name, great. If you want to share the story anonymously and have me describe it as "a shelter in the Southeast" or "a rescue in the Pacific Northwest," that's fine too. Your call.


    Question for the group. What's one prevention program you tried that didn't work the way you thought it would? And looking back, what do you actually think went wrong?


    The comments on this post might end up in a chapter. So write the version you'd want another shelter to read before they made the same mistake.


    #AdoptionsandAdoptionPrograms
    #CaseManagement*
    #CommunityCatManagement
    #CommunityPartnerships*
    #FosterPrograms
    #FundraisingandDevelopment
    #PetSupportServices*
    #Rehoming
    #ReturntoHome(LostPetReunification)

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


  • 2.  RE: I'm writing a book about prevention programs. I need your failures more than your wins.

    Posted 7 days ago

    Its not necessarily a program, however we have tried "finder fosters" or "owner fosters" - where we agree to take on the animal(s) if the person with them now continues to foster them until adoption.

    We have explained to these people that for certain animals - fostering could be many months (ie black adult pitbulls or bully breeds). It seems like every time we enter into an agreement with this situation, we get an email a week later about a "family emergency" or an incident that happened and they can no longer foster. Or they ask for someone to take the animal for a weekend and refuse to take it back. 
    We are small. We are also now foster based and we have been caught in some really tough spots due to this.  Now it makes us real hesitant to agree to these situations, even if its an animal we think will adopt out quickly.

    I don't know of a way to fix or change this. Unless we were to say - then keep your animal and find another rescue to help. Which would be a horrible thing to do. Mainly for the animal and the rescue reputation. At that point, I usually have choice words for that person so their feelings are 1000% irrelevant to me.



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    Sarah
    Paws in Middle Georgia Animal Rescue
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  • 3.  RE: I'm writing a book about prevention programs. I need your failures more than your wins.

    Posted 7 days ago

    Sarah, this is exactly the kind of failure I was hoping people would be honest about, so thank you.

    We hit the same wall, hard. We call it Finder-to-Foster, and early on we did it on a handshake, the way you described. Same result every time: the family emergency a week later, the "can you take him for the weekend" that turns into never taking him back. For a small foster-based group that isn't an inconvenience, it's a crisis, because the animal lands back on you with nowhere to go.

    Here's what changed it for us, and none of it is about trusting people more. It's about building the arrangement so a bail can't sink you.

    First, we require a foster application even for finder-fosters. It feels like friction, and some people balk at it, but the ones who balk are almost always the ones who would have bailed. The application is the filter.

    Second, before the animal moves, there's a signed foster agreement that says the quiet parts out loud: the timeline could be months, here is who has placement authority, and if you need out you give us notice and a handoff, you do not drop the animal somewhere. It gives you standing when someone tries to dump.

    Third, we line up a backup foster in parallel from day one. So when someone does bail, it's a phone call, not an emergency. We assume the bail will happen and build for it.

    And fourth, for a lot of these we don't take custody at all. We run it as a Managed Rehoming case: the person keeps and houses the animal, and we run the placement, the listing, the screening, the support, all under a signed agreement. The animal stays their responsibility until a real adopter is ready. If they flake, it stays their situation to keep managing, not ours to absorb. For a small foster-based group, deciding when custody actually transfers is the single biggest thing that takes the risk off you.

    You're right that "keep your animal and find another rescue" isn't something you can live with. So instead we made the bail survivable. You can't fix the people. You can make it so they can't take you down with them.

    And for what it's worth, the choice words are valid. I've had them too.



    ------------------------------
    Join The Shift To Prevention.

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

    Original Message


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