Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi,

I'm representing a brand-new dog rescue called Homebound Hounds in San Diego, and I am curious to hear/learn what tribal knowledge you'd like to share about how to set our foster-based nonprofit up for success.

If you'd like to share your lessons learned / best practices, we are all ears!

Thank you,

Jess

homeboundhounds.org

#FundraisingandDevelopment

------------------------------
Jessica Liu
President
HOMEBOUND HOUNDS
CA
------------------------------

Hi Jessica! Congratulations on the new dog rescue! 

There are definitely some threads and resources on Maddie's Pet Forum that might help. 

Maddie's Fund holds weekly Community Conversations and one of the conversation topics was on Lessons Learned: https://maddies.fund/communityconversations62424

This is another great thread about things people have learned on Community Conversations: https://forum.maddiesfund.org/discussion/community-conversations-reflections-what-have-you-learned-this-year

I know that one thing that I wish I knew when I started in this space was how important it is to remove barriers to adoptions and fostering. This course on the Power of Yes has been very inspiring for me! 

------------------------------
Sheila Kouhkan
Senior Education Specialist
Maddie's Fund
CA
------------------------------

HI Jessica!

I am in the same boat; a friend of mine and I left a big rescue and started our own small, foster based rescue in October in the Florida panhandle. We got all our paperwork, website, FB page, etc. taken care of before we put our info out there. It took awhile but we wanted to look professional up front when people started seeing us out there.  We filed our 501c3, filed with our state as a not for profit, got our bank account set up, etc.  The hardest part is finding fosters; our shelter has like 400 fosters and the other large rescue in the area has a lot of fosters too, so there is not a big base for that because the community is tapped out. Hopefully San Diego has a larger pool. 

This area does not have a lot of vets and it has been surprisingly difficult to find a vet that will give us much of a discount. So we have been darting around to different places that can take our pets to get them taken care of as quickly as possible.  We both use the same vet, and they will happily work with us, but they are the most expensive in the area...shop around for a good vet unless you have one on your team already. 

I would also assume San Diego has better spay/neuter options than we do here, but get on a low cost S/N program. 

Good luck and congrats on your rescue!!!!

Enger Dickey

co-director, Emerald Coast Pet Rescue

------------------------------
Enger Dickey
Co-director
Emerald Coast Pet Rescue
FL
------------------------------