Animal Welfare Professionals

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

#FundraisingandDevelopment

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BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
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Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Julielani, thank you. The 20% number is the right kind of specific. Most prevention advocates ask for "more," which gets nodded at and then ignored. A concrete percentage tied to family retention forces funders to examine where their dollars actually flow versus where the problem actually starts.

The harder-to-measure piece is where I keep landing. Prevention isn't actually harder to measure, it's that nobody has built the shared infrastructure to capture it. Intake gets measured because every shelter has to log it. Helpline outcomes don't get measured because most orgs don't run a helpline, and the ones that do don't share the data with each other or with funders. That's a structural gap, not a measurement gap.

Your work with fixed-income and unhoused guardians is exactly where the data sits. The interventions you're already doing every day, sliding-scale behavior support, education at the moment somebody is questioning whether they can keep their dog, those are the case outcomes that should be showing up in field-level reporting. They aren't, because nobody asks for them.

We're building something that tries to change that. The Animal Welfare Resource Network connects prevention-focused orgs into a shared data layer so the calls, the resources distributed, the retentions, and the outcomes all become visible across regions. Davis is a long way from Birmingham, but the model is built to scale.

Would love to compare notes if you're open to it. Calendly is calendly.com/animal-angels.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Thank you, BJ. 

I agree that in many ways, the field has normalized measuring downstream outcomes because intake is visible and standardized, while prevention work remains decentralized, relationship-based, and often community-led.

Yet those upstream interventions may be the very things reducing future intake pressure.

I also appreciate your point that prevention data already exists in the day-to-day work of organizations supporting guardians before relinquishment happens. We simply have not built systems that value or aggregate those outcomes consistently.

I also think fostering belongs in the prevention conversation. A foster home can prevent behavioral deterioration, reduce stress, improve transitions into adoptive homes, and ultimately increase placement success and retention. Prevention is not only about stopping intake, but also reducing the emotional and behavioral fallout that can happen after intake. 

I would absolutely be interested in learning more about the network you're building and love to compare notes. 

Julielani, thank you. The 20% number is the right kind of specific. Most prevention advocates ask for "more," which gets nodded at and then ignored. A concrete percentage tied to family retention forces funders to examine where their dollars actually flow versus where the problem actually starts.

The harder-to-measure piece is where I keep landing. Prevention isn't actually harder to measure, it's that nobody has built the shared infrastructure to capture it. Intake gets measured because every shelter has to log it. Helpline outcomes don't get measured because most orgs don't run a helpline, and the ones that do don't share the data with each other or with funders. That's a structural gap, not a measurement gap.

Your work with fixed-income and unhoused guardians is exactly where the data sits. The interventions you're already doing every day, sliding-scale behavior support, education at the moment somebody is questioning whether they can keep their dog, those are the case outcomes that should be showing up in field-level reporting. They aren't, because nobody asks for them.

We're building something that tries to change that. The Animal Welfare Resource Network connects prevention-focused orgs into a shared data layer so the calls, the resources distributed, the retentions, and the outcomes all become visible across regions. Davis is a long way from Birmingham, but the model is built to scale.

Would love to compare notes if you're open to it. Calendly is calendly.com/animal-angels.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Julielani, the foster-as-prevention point is the one most people miss. The downstream cost of foster failure is huge: behavioral deterioration in kennel, stress-related health issues, longer length of stay, returns, and the trauma cycle that keeps both the dog and the next adopter from succeeding. Prevention isn't just upstream of intake. It's also upstream of every failed placement.

We run four foster types at AAF for exactly that reason: Foster-to-Train (animals get basic skills before adoption), Finder-to-Foster (the person who picked up the stray fosters until reunification or rehoming), Temporary Crisis (Bridge cases, like the one we're actively managing where an owner is hospitalized and the alternative would have been the shelter), and Regular Foster. Each one targets a different prevention point in the lifecycle.

Calendly is calendly.com/animal-angels. Grab a slot and let's compare notes.

Thank you, BJ. 

I agree that in many ways, the field has normalized measuring downstream outcomes because intake is visible and standardized, while prevention work remains decentralized, relationship-based, and often community-led.

Yet those upstream interventions may be the very things reducing future intake pressure.

I also appreciate your point that prevention data already exists in the day-to-day work of organizations supporting guardians before relinquishment happens. We simply have not built systems that value or aggregate those outcomes consistently.

I also think fostering belongs in the prevention conversation. A foster home can prevent behavioral deterioration, reduce stress, improve transitions into adoptive homes, and ultimately increase placement success and retention. Prevention is not only about stopping intake, but also reducing the emotional and behavioral fallout that can happen after intake. 

I would absolutely be interested in learning more about the network you're building and love to compare notes. 

Julielani, thank you. The 20% number is the right kind of specific. Most prevention advocates ask for "more," which gets nodded at and then ignored. A concrete percentage tied to family retention forces funders to examine where their dollars actually flow versus where the problem actually starts.

The harder-to-measure piece is where I keep landing. Prevention isn't actually harder to measure, it's that nobody has built the shared infrastructure to capture it. Intake gets measured because every shelter has to log it. Helpline outcomes don't get measured because most orgs don't run a helpline, and the ones that do don't share the data with each other or with funders. That's a structural gap, not a measurement gap.

Your work with fixed-income and unhoused guardians is exactly where the data sits. The interventions you're already doing every day, sliding-scale behavior support, education at the moment somebody is questioning whether they can keep their dog, those are the case outcomes that should be showing up in field-level reporting. They aren't, because nobody asks for them.

We're building something that tries to change that. The Animal Welfare Resource Network connects prevention-focused orgs into a shared data layer so the calls, the resources distributed, the retentions, and the outcomes all become visible across regions. Davis is a long way from Birmingham, but the model is built to scale.

Would love to compare notes if you're open to it. Calendly is calendly.com/animal-angels.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

I just joined and love that this question is one of the first I saw.  I am a volunteer for the Louisiana State Animal Response Team (LSART) who's main purpose is to help during/after disasters. A few years ago, I developed a "pet project" and called it Ralph's Responders or RALPH (Ready and Living Prepared Heros). The goal is to teach kids about animal care and including their pets in disaster planning. My hope is that kids would go home after a program and like when a firefighter teaches kids about having a fire plan, the kids would ask their parents about their pet plan, thus forcing parents to be involved. There's a lot of good resources for this on our website under the kids corner at www.lsart.org that range from pet profiles to games.

I also wrote the book Rowen and the Animal Shelter that teaches kids what to do when they see a stray, who animal control is, what animal shelters do, and how they can help their local shelter. There's resources in the back of this book including discussion questions, games, how to help their shelter, and caring for their pet.

I joined Maddies to learn pain points and if there are other educational resources that I could develop to help prevent things.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Sara, welcome to Maddie's. You picked the right thread to land on.

The kids-as-vector approach is sharp. Most animal welfare education aims at adults who are already doing the deciding, but adults also have the most fixed habits and the strongest defensiveness about being told they're doing something wrong. Kids don't have that filter. They come home from school, ask the questions, and the parent has to answer. That's how fire plan education actually changed household fire preparedness over a generation, exactly the framework you're applying to pets.

The disaster prep angle is also a real prevention angle that often gets missed. Surrender doesn't only happen from slow-burn financial or housing pressure. It happens after hurricanes, floods, and house fires when families couldn't bring their animals to evacuation shelters or didn't have pet emergency kits ready. Asheville Humane mentioned earlier in this thread that Hurricane Helene reshaped their entire intake model. Disaster prevention is surrender prevention, just on a faster timeline.

Rowen and the Animal Shelter sounds like it's filling a real gap too. Most rescue and shelter education for kids is either too clinical or too sentimental, and the practical "what to do when you see a stray, who animal control is, how shelters work" piece almost never gets covered at a kid-comprehensible level.

I'd love to compare notes. AAF runs prevention-first work in central Alabama, and one of our content arms (Keep The Pet, a comedic dog training video series) is family-friendly enough that there might be cross-promotion or co-development angles, particularly on disaster prep content for kids. My Calendly is calendly.com/animal-angels.

I just joined and love that this question is one of the first I saw.  I am a volunteer for the Louisiana State Animal Response Team (LSART) who's main purpose is to help during/after disasters. A few years ago, I developed a "pet project" and called it Ralph's Responders or RALPH (Ready and Living Prepared Heros). The goal is to teach kids about animal care and including their pets in disaster planning. My hope is that kids would go home after a program and like when a firefighter teaches kids about having a fire plan, the kids would ask their parents about their pet plan, thus forcing parents to be involved. There's a lot of good resources for this on our website under the kids corner at www.lsart.org that range from pet profiles to games.

I also wrote the book Rowen and the Animal Shelter that teaches kids what to do when they see a stray, who animal control is, what animal shelters do, and how they can help their local shelter. There's resources in the back of this book including discussion questions, games, how to help their shelter, and caring for their pet.

I joined Maddies to learn pain points and if there are other educational resources that I could develop to help prevent things.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Our mission is mostly focused on intake prevention. We raise money to support shelters with their programs that help people keep their pets. Right now we give quarterly donations to Cat Adoption Team for their Keeping Cats in Homes program; Red Rover for their On Call Angels program; and Annie & Millie's Place, who help unhoused people keep their pets. When we get "extra", we support pet food banks and TNR for community cats.

I would love to see more tracking of these outcomes, especially since the BIG organizations are so focused on their failing "no-kill" strategy (because that's where the money is) they're basically completely ignoring the fact that preventing intake in the first place is a much better solution to the overpopulation crisis. #nobirthmovement

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Hi Johanna,

Your last paragraph is the one I keep coming back to. Tracking is the thing nobody wants to do because "no-kill" sells better as a marketing line than honest math does.

That gap is exactly why we built the Animal Welfare Resource Network. The AWRN tracks every Bridge intervention, every Pet Help Desk call, every prevented intake, with cost data and 30/60/90 day follow-ups. The point is to give shelters and grantmakers like you the kind of outcome reporting that lets you defend prevention funding instead of always defending it against the no-kill talking point.

Cat Adoption Team's Keeping Cats in Homes, Red Rover's On Call Angels, and Annie & Millie's Place are the right kinds of programs to be funding. The pattern across all three is that they catch families before the surrender desk. Most of the field does not fund this work because it does not generate placement photos.

A few questions if you're up for it:

1. Are any of the orgs you fund currently using shared infrastructure to report back to you, or is each one reporting outcomes in its own format?
2. What outcomes matter most when you decide whether to fund a program again?
3. Would it be useful if the orgs you fund had a unified way to report intervention type, cost-per-case, and prevention outcomes back to you?

If the answer to that third one is yes, the AWRN does that today.

Either way, I'd love to stay in touch. We just launched a newsletter on prevention work called The Shift to Prevention at theshifttoprevention.substack.com, and AAF's Maddie's Fund webinar with Sara Pizano is June 1 if you want to sit in.

Thanks for the work you're doing. The #nobirthmovement framing is sharper than most.

Our mission is mostly focused on intake prevention. We raise money to support shelters with their programs that help people keep their pets. Right now we give quarterly donations to Cat Adoption Team for their Keeping Cats in Homes program; Red Rover for their On Call Angels program; and Annie & Millie's Place, who help unhoused people keep their pets. When we get "extra", we support pet food banks and TNR for community cats.

I would love to see more tracking of these outcomes, especially since the BIG organizations are so focused on their failing "no-kill" strategy (because that's where the money is) they're basically completely ignoring the fact that preventing intake in the first place is a much better solution to the overpopulation crisis. #nobirthmovement

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Hello BJ,

This is a very interesting point. In this vein of conversation, I did some research recently for a project and learnt something shocking; The burden of providing outside care to prevent new shelter intakes, aka pet food pantries, free/discounted pet care, free/discounted grooming? Falls almost entirely on privately run organisations. Government subsidised shelters provide only a small amount of community care, perhaps due to the strictness of government budgets and contracts. It's shocking, because it means the burden of care is heavily on already overburdened private organisations. It's also important to note that many of these programs, especially pet food and supply pantries, are reliant on donations, which means the quality and outreach of these programs are very limited. I certainly think better government support is critical to really keep animals in their loving homes, becuase the current system is overstrained, unfairly balanced, and unsustainable in times of crisis. I am curious if anyone has any additional input on this matter. 

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

Hello BJ,

This is a very interesting point. In this vein of conversation, I did some research recently for a project and learnt something shocking; The burden of providing outside care to prevent new shelter intakes, aka pet food pantries, free/discounted pet care, free/discounted grooming? Falls almost entirely on privately run organisations. Government subsidised shelters provide only a small amount of community care, perhaps due to the strictness of government budgets and contracts. It's shocking, because it means the burden of care is heavily on already overburdened private organisations. It's also important to note that many of these programs, especially pet food and supply pantries, are reliant on donations, which means the quality and outreach of these programs are very limited. I certainly think better government support is critical to really keep animals in their loving homes, becuase the current system is overstrained, unfairly balanced, and unsustainable in times of crisis. I am curious if anyone has any additional input on this matter. 

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.

The data for metrics and performance indicators are available for NGO funders and potential government funding, but there is a parallel need for human services alongside the intake prevention effort and the slow trend towards intake prevention funding parallels the marginal progression of One Health-type  programs. Funding stakeholders need clarity on what prevention will look like because there is a risk of the "prevention conundrum" (meaning if we're preventing a problem then how do we know that there's still a problem to prevent that would require continued funding?)

We should see an acceleration to intake prevention funding as One Health programs gain traction and similar support. In that vein, we need to have early inter-service conversations about what efficient collaboration should look like and where responsibilities should sit. 

Hello BJ,

This is a very interesting point. In this vein of conversation, I did some research recently for a project and learnt something shocking; The burden of providing outside care to prevent new shelter intakes, aka pet food pantries, free/discounted pet care, free/discounted grooming? Falls almost entirely on privately run organisations. Government subsidised shelters provide only a small amount of community care, perhaps due to the strictness of government budgets and contracts. It's shocking, because it means the burden of care is heavily on already overburdened private organisations. It's also important to note that many of these programs, especially pet food and supply pantries, are reliant on donations, which means the quality and outreach of these programs are very limited. I certainly think better government support is critical to really keep animals in their loving homes, becuase the current system is overstrained, unfairly balanced, and unsustainable in times of crisis. I am curious if anyone has any additional input on this matter. 

Genuine question for the field.

Name one nationally-funded program that pays a shelter for the animals they prevented from ever coming in.

We measure live release rate. We measure length of stay. We measure adoption numbers. All output. All happening after the family has already lost the pet.

We built a system that pays us to process animals after intake, then act surprised when intake never goes down.

If the only thing we fund is the back end, the front end will keep filling. Every year. Forever.

So here's what I want to know. What would change in your shelter or rescue if even 20% of your funding was tied to families you kept together, not animals you placed?

Curious what people think. Especially if you disagree.