Animal Welfare Professionals

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*

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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
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In Northwest Arkansas, I helped build a database for community support requests. While this doesn't directly track intake prevention,  it does capture information regarding specific reasons for surrender or support needed. The database works like this: Community member fills out a form with contact information and chooses from several options for Support. An automated follow-up email is sent to them, personalized based on reasons they provided that support is needed with relevant resources. They can reply to this email and it goes to a real person's inbox. 

All support requests are routed to a dozen private and municipal shelters and rescues in the area. This allows shelters to talk to each other, view animals and people in other communities, and work together for best outcomes for pets and their people. This can be an intake diversion through spay/neuter in the next county over, or a request to a specific shelter that is overcrowded picked up by a neighboring shelter with an empty kennel. 

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Lee Allen
Director of Operations
Good Shepherd Humane Society
Eureka Springs, AR
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Hi BJ,  We crossed path before on the topic of "prevention". Here is a link to our latest newsletter focusing on prevention https://www.thelifeofkai.org/newsletters.  To answer your questions  - How do you count a surrender that did not happen ? You can't or at least with great difficulties and we attempted (see newsletter). Has anyone ever funded you for prevention? Yes we got funded by a local grantor.

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Julielani Chang
The Life of Kai: Compassion Connections Inc.
Davis CA
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Hi Julielani,

Good to hear from you, and yes, we crossed paths on prevention. Thank you for the newsletter link. I'm reading through it now.

Your answer to the first question is the honest one, and it's the exact thing I'm wrestling with. You can't cleanly count a surrender that never happened, because the moment you prevent it, it goes invisible. The best I've landed on is to stop pretending "families helped" and "intakes prevented" are the same number. We're building our intake so it captures self-reported surrender risk up front, would you have surrendered in 7 days, 30, 90, then following up at those marks. It doesn't give you proof, but it gives you a defensible estimate and a way to separate the family who was truly at the edge from the one who just needed a hand. I'd love to see how you attempted it.

And your second answer gave me hope. A local grantor funding prevention is exactly the proof of concept a lot of us need, because "fund the thing that stops the problem before it starts" is still a hard sell to most funders.

I'd like to stay connected and compare notes as we both work this out. If you're ever up for a call, I'll make the time.

We don't compete. We connect.

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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
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-04-2026 01:05 PM
From: Julielani Chang
Subject: We can count every adoption. Why can't we count a single surrender we prevented?

Hi BJ,  We crossed path before on the topic of "prevention". Here is a link to our latest newsletter focusing on prevention https://www.thelifeofkai.org/newsletters.  To answer your questions  - How do you count a surrender that did not happen ? You can't or at least with great difficulties and we attempted (see newsletter). Has anyone ever funded you for prevention? Yes we got funded by a local grantor.

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Julielani Chang
The Life of Kai: Compassion Connections Inc.
Davis CA
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