Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi everyone,

I'm a volunteer working with our shelter in refining our foster care program procedures and guidelines.  Our foster care participants are also volunteers.  My question is this:  How do you determine the number of volunteer hours involved in providing a foster home and care?  Do you use a set number of hours per day of foster care?  Does your shelter even track these volunteer hours?

Thanks for your insight!

Cheers,

Betty

Hello Betty!

Our shelter does not specifically track the volunteer hours provided by foster homes and care due to the difficulty of obtaining that information. However, we have had a few individuals track their the time spent caring for the animals in foster care (for a school project they were doing). They simply wrote down the time on a piece of paper, took care of the animals, and then wrote the time down of completion. They were "medical fostering" a sick animal so they ended up with ~ 1 to 1 1/2 hours per day.

Hope this helps some!

Amelia

Vet care for our special needs cats in lifetime care!

We have fosters log 1 hour per day unless they are bottle baby fosters then they estimate their actual hours.  If the kittens require extra care for illness, socializing, etc then they log estimated actual hours.  

We currently track foster hours and allocate one hour per day for foster animals over 6 months and 2 hours per day for foster animals under 6 months.  I was told this was an "industry standard estimate" but it's not very accurate so we're thinking about coming up with a more accurate metric with hours dependent upon the foster reason.

@FosterSupSaHumane, I thought you might find this thread interesting.

Hey Betty! Over here at the Pensacola Humane Society we have a little spread sheet type set up for the hours of fosters can claim volunteer hours for. I've attached it to this comment and I hope this helps!

Attachment(s)

PostFile-5be55c31-95e5-4ac6-878e-82b1871fa63a.pdf   235 KB 1 version

Thank you all very much for taking the time to share your insight and experience!  You have given me some great information and ideas.  Have a wonderful week!

Cheers,

Betty