Michelle, glad you put this up. Disclosure since it matters: Peaceful Coexistence is one of our AWRN partners, so I have watched this question up close in her service area and in mine.
Stacy's post is the one I would build on, because sequencing matters more than the menu. There is hard evidence behind it. A twelve-year controlled study in urban Israel, published in PNAS in 2022, found that sterilization only reversed population growth when it was intensive, geographically contiguous, and sustained above roughly 70 percent of the population. Below that threshold, compensatory effects ate the gains. Three separate population models put the number somewhere between 70 and 94 percent. Which means scattered, part-time, everybody-does-a-little spay/neuter does not move the population, and that is a hard thing to hear when scattered and part-time is exactly what the funding allows.
Hali, the paragraph where you caught yourself on the repeat pantry client is the most useful thing in this thread. You named the frustration honestly and then landed on the right side of it. That animal still needs food. Most of us have had that argument with ourselves in a parking lot.
Judy, on the curiosity question, I would offer one reframe and I offer it with respect. When someone takes a puppy out of a Walmart parking lot and never goes looking for what it needs, that is usually not incuriosity. It is that nobody in their life ever modeled that a pet comes with a care schedule, and no system around them made asking easy or safe. If we treat that as a character problem, we build programs to fix people. If we treat it as an information distribution problem, we build programs to reach them. The second works better, and it is also more likely to be true.
Here is the thing nobody has said yet, and I say it knowing everyone in this thread is doing real work.
Judy just listed four organizations in Northern New Mexico doing prevention: two free spay/neuter clinics, SAFE Pet Partners on training and fencing, the Taos shelter and a couple of nonprofits on food. Hali runs monthly vaccine clinics with testing, microchips, a pantry, and transport. Carol has Fix a Friend and Paws-Ability. Michelle has training, food, and preventative care in rural Colorado.
Every one of those communities already has the pieces. What none of them has is a way for the pieces to see each other. The spay/neuter clinic does not know the pantry served that family last month. The trainer does not know the shelter took a surrender call from that address. Nobody is holding the whole picture.
That is not an access problem. That is a coordination problem sitting on top of an access problem, and it is why the same family can be touched four times by four organizations and still end up at the shelter door.
The second gap is measurement. Almost nobody in this field can answer whether prevention worked, because almost nobody codes intake by reason. If you cannot say what share of your intake was cost-driven versus housing versus behavior, you cannot tell a funder what your prevention dollars bought. You cannot tell yourself either.
So my answer, Michelle: access alone will not end it. Access at real volume, coordinated across the organizations already standing in the community, and measured honestly, might. The first part is a money problem. The other two are will problems, and those are the ones we can start on Monday.
I wrote a free guide on the operational side of this if it is useful to anyone. No pitch attached, take whatever helps: https://animal-angelsfoundation.org/ShiftToPrevention.html
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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.organimal-angelsfoundation.org
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