Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi, I’m looking for a foster-ambassador kit to give to fosters that streamline the process, such as obtaining personality information should the pet return to the shelter, any social media guidelines or templates they can utilize to promote the pet for adoption online or even a foster guideline document that outlines what to do. We have 3 shelters that are spread far apart from each other and utilize volunteers to run our foster program due to lack of a foster coordinator position (or rescue coordinator) and I’d really like to try and standardize what we send home with fosters, our expectations of marketing and obtaining additional behavior on the pet. @SAguilar 

Tara Diller, Tara.diller@sbcphd.org

805-319-8646

Director of Animal Services 

Santa Barbara County (CA)

This is one of my most favorite topics! I sent you an email with about a billion links, but I'll post a few of the resources here in case they can be helpful to anyone:

Foster pet marketing checklist

PACC's online training for fosters, which includes a segment on marketing foster pets

Kelly, would u mind making your foster checklist so that I can share it with our volunteers? It’s so helpful !

I'm struggling with GoogleDrive but you can also find it on page 44 of this document: https://www.maddiesfund.org/assets/documents/foster-resources/MF-foster-caregiver-marketing-guide.pdf

@Kelly Duer! You’re the best!

Thank you for consistently helping me circle back to materials and such, especially as of late!  Programs that I’ve always considered standard practices/programs, like foster, aren’t so standard everywhere and can be difficult to build up when you don’t have a dedicated person to run it. We have 3 shelters, up to an hour apart, so I’ll need to rely on volunteers to help us run these kinds of programs.....now, to find those volunteers.... 

We are definitely a project shelter if anyone needs to study what those look like! 😆

Hi Tara,

I've been fostering for a few decades and have become aware of the lack of training available for fosters. Most shelters don't have the time or resources to train fosters which leads to a lot of time wasted answering the same questions over and over as well as low foster retention due to frustration and bad experiences.

I have some resources that may be helpful https://worldreadypets.com/fostering and I am developing an online video training series for fosters. If you'd like to be notified about our progress you can join our mailing list. I am also interested in topics that shelters and fosters might be interested in learning more about.