Every shelter I know can tell you its adoption numbers to the decimal. Live release rate, length of stay, intake by the day. We have gotten good at counting.
But ask any of us how many surrenders we prevented last month, and the room goes quiet. We do not have that number. Most of us cannot even build it.
That is a real problem, because the number we cannot count is the one that decides the whole game. A surrender prevented is an intake that never happened, a kennel that stayed open, a family that stayed whole, and a cost the county never paid. It is the most valuable thing we do, and it is invisible on every dashboard we own.
So it does not get funded. You cannot put "47 surrenders we talked a family out of" on a grant report the way you can put "312 adoptions." The work that prevents the crisis loses every budget fight to the work that cleans it up, because only one of them shows up in the data.
I have been building the tracking to try to make prevention visible: intake diverted, the resource that did it, the follow-up that confirmed the pet stayed home. It is hard. Half the time the family just stops calling because things got better, and a good outcome looks like silence.
So I want to hear from the people actually doing this.
How do you count a surrender that did not happen? Do you track diversions at all? And if you do, has anyone ever funded you for them?
Genuinely asking. I think whoever cracks this changes what gets paid for in this field.
#AdoptionsandAdoptionPrograms#CommunityPartnerships*#PetSupportServices*------------------------------
Join The Shift To Prevention.
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
calendy.com/animal-angels
bjadkins@animal-angels.organimal-angelsfoundation.org
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