AWLA Hawk » Principles

Progress Confirmed

shelterhawk — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:04:14 +0000

On March 22, 2010 — just under a year ago — Kay Speerstra resigned as AWLA’s Executive Director. As the animal-outcomes data attest (see ShelterWatch.org), she left behind an organization that dramatically underperformed leading national open-admission shelters when it came to saving homeless cats and dogs. This was in spite of the fact that AWLA had greater financial resources and received fewer animals than most of the more successful shelters. Clearly, AWLA’s lack of commitment and effort trumped its monetary and logistical advantages. As posts from last summer like where have all the kittens gone? and Arlington’s homeless dogs indicate, AWLA’s animal-outcomes performance did not start improving immediately after Speerstra resigned. But there were hints — an offsite dog-adoption event, an effort to repair damaged relationships with local animal-rescue organizations — that more hopeful days lay ahead. Those hopeful days are here, and acknowledgement and thanks for that are due to Joann DelToro and the AWLA Board. Many observers assumed the Board would hire an AWLA insider who would attempt to preserve the status quo. Instead they conducted a deliberate national search before hiring Neil Trent from the Longmont Humane Society in Colorado. After Trent arrived at AWLA six months ago, things really started to change. During his first six months at AWLA, the organization has: – launched a trap-neuter-return (TNR) program in partnership with Alley Cat Allies; – expanded its use of social media websites to promote its cats and dogs; – begun posting flyers to promote its adoptable cats and dogs at local vet clinics; – met numerous times with leaders of local rescue organizations to discuss how they can collaborate with AWLA; – begun planning to extend its foster program to include adult cats and dogs; – begun publishing its animal outcomes data on its website using the standard Asilomar format. These steps are just a start, but they show that Trent realizes that improving the prospects for the homeless animals in its care isn’t rocket science — it just requires implementing the same kinds of programs that the most successful open-admission shelters have been practicing for years. And sure enough, AWLA’s newfound effort is beginning to yield improved results:

Homeless cats	7/09 – 6/10	7/10 – 12/10
Adopted	64.1%	77.0%
Transferred	3.1%	4.2%
Died or Lost	1.9%	1.5%
Killed	31.0%	17.3%

Homeless dogs	7/09 – 6/10	7/10 – 12/10
Adopted	64.3%	74.3%
Transferred	3.9%	6.5%
Died or Lost	0.6%	0.5%
Killed	31.2%	18.7%

What a difference a year makes. AWLA’s turnaround is still a work in progress, but it’s clear by now that Neil Trent has set the right goals and has begun to drive the organization toward them. We look forward to further progress at AWLA, and hope that its local peers like the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria and the Montgomery County Humane Society are taking note. The homeless companion animals consigned to them deserve no less of an effort.

Forward Progress?

shelterhawk — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:42:54 +0000

It’s been almost two months now since Neil Trent joined AWLA as its new Executive Director, and some good things are happening. AWLA found a home for Mya For starters, AWLA has taken tentative first steps toward marketing its on-view dogs. Three offsite events featuring adoptable AWLA dogs were held during the last two months. And AWLA seems to be discovering the potential of online marketing. They have yet to exploit Craigslist, but they did send out a broadcast e-mail asking recipients to help find a home for Mya, a young black dog with a bully-breed jaw who’d arrived at the shelter in April, gone on-view in May… and then spent five months waiting for a home. She was adopted in early October. And while we haven’t seen the outcomes data for the most recent quarter yet, daily observation of the dogs listed on the AWLA website suggests that fewer dogs are mysteriously vanishing a week or two after they first appear on the site. I won’t be surprised if the Q3 data shows that AWLA has stopped killing the vast majority of its pitbulls and other powerful breeds. Other promising signs: Trent has met with and listened to the advice of local animal-welfare advocates, many of whom have been repeatedly frustrated by their past interactions with AWLA. He has committed the organization to launching a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats, which his predecessor was unwilling to do. And he seems willing to expand the scope of AWLA’s foster program and develop more efficient ways of providing veterinary care for all its animals. So the early evidence suggests that Trent is trying to steer the organization in the right direction. A less encouraging observation is that he didn’t bring his team from Longmont Humane with him, which means he has inherited a management team steeped in AWLA’s traditional culture of selective disclosure and a circle-the-wagons mentality. Converting AWLA into a top-tier shelter (like those in Reno, Charlottesville, Ithaca, Richmond, Berkeley et. al.) would be a much easier task if he had a lieutenant or two who understood how these highly effective shelters work. If Trent chooses to retain the management team he inherited, AWLA’s recently released FY2010 Annual Report demonstrates the entrenched culture he’s up against. For example, the financial report states that for the fifth consecutive year, AWLA spent more money ($1.427 million) executing its responsibilities for animal sheltering and animal control than it received from its contract with Arlington County ($1.253 million). The report explicitly notes that “The League subsidizes this deficit (of $173,610) with its own funds.” As we pointed out in our Fun with Numbers series last fall, this is pure fiction. Correctly allocating the fees that AWLA receives from adopting out county-funded shelter animals would go a long way toward erasing this “deficit”. Instead AWLA classifies those fees as “program revenues”. Tuition from AWLA’s summer Kids Camp is another example of “program revenues” that is entirely dependent on the County-funded shelter animals. The bottom line is that Arlington County subsidizes AWLA, not the converse. Without its County Contract, AWLA would just be one of many local animal welfare organizations. Without a guaranteed revenue stream, it would have to spend more of its time pulling animals from municipal pounds and working to find them homes, because its fundraising efforts would depend on an expanding legacy of successful adoptions. Much less effort would be devoted to projects that don’t directly save animals, like Kids Camp, Canine Behavior Classes, and Baby-Ready Pets. Without the County Contract, AWLA would have to compete for volunteers, adopters, and donors based on its animal-saving performance, rather than rely on taxpayer funding and a captive supply of animals. For years, AWLA has essentially been a fundraising organization that uses its stream of animals to achieve its monetary goals, rather than an animal rescue organization that uses its stream of funds to achieve its lifesaving goals. If you don’t believe that, download AWLA’s tax returns from GuideStar and juxtapose them with its animal outcomes results. Or read this post. Or look at how AWLA’s profit of nearly $400,000 in FY2010 didn’t help increase the number of homeless cats and dogs it saved:

		FY 2010	FY 2009	FY 2008
Homeless dog outcomes		490	478	432
	Adopted	315	315	268
	Transferred	19	15	22
	Died or lost	3	7	6
	Killed	153	141	136
Live release rate*		68.2%	69.0%	67.1%

Homeless cat outcomes		1079	1145	1125
	Adopted	692	765	735
	Transferred	33	3	4
	Died or lost	20	21	32
	Killed	334	356	354
Live release rate*		67.2%	67.1%	65.7%
* = (adopted + transferred) / outcomes Despite these uninspiring results, I’m convinced that Neil Trent has the motivation and ability to convert AWLA into the resource that it can and should be. But he’ll need plenty of encouragement and help from the outside the organization.

What’s Possible, Part Three

shelterhawk — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:56:25 +0000

August 16, 2010

The Animal Welfare League of Arlington is pleased to announce that Neil Trent will join the organization as Executive Director in September 2010. Neil brings over 30 years of experience in international, national and local animal welfare. He is currently the Executive Director of the Longmont Humane Society in Longmont, Colorado.

Neil Trent has been at Longmont Humane for less than two years, but if he can convert AWLA into an organization like LHS, the AWLA Board will have dramatically improved the prospects for Arlington’s homeless companion animals.

Here are a few reasons for optimism:

- LHS took in 2000 cats and over 2000 dogs in 2009, compared with 1357 cats and 900 dogs for AWLA. So the new Director won’t have to worry about challenges related to scale as he addresses AWLA’s cultural deficiencies.

- LHS publishes its Asilomar animal outcomes statistics on its website, making it easy to track its progress in saving homeless cats and dogs. There is no more important step an animal shelter can take toward improving its performance.

- LHS has two staff veterinarians. AWLA could have prevented considerable suffering on the part of its animals and countless hours of unnecessary driving, waiting, and stress on the part of its volunteers if it had been willing to invest in in-house veterinary care.

- LHS extends its foster program to adult cats and dogs, not just kittens and puppies. AWLA’s foster program barely exists today.

- According to ShelterWatch.org, LHS ranks 5th out of the 49 open-admission shelters listed in its rate of dog adoptions, and 15th out of 48 shelters in its rate of cat adoptions. AWLA’s dogs need more help than its cats.

- LHS has a Tr/Eu (transferred/euthanized) ratio for dogs of .74, which is above average for the shelters listed on ShelterWatch. Its Tr/Eu for cats is an anemic .07, but that may be partially attributable to a preference for dogs over cats in Boulder Valley, Colorado.

And there are no doubt additional reasons for optimism.

We would be remiss if we didn’t applaud the effort that AWLA’s Chairman personally invested in the search for a new Executive Director. There have been other recent signs of progress at AWLA — a meeting with rescue groups in July, an offsite dog-adoption event last weekend — but nothing demonstrates a commitment to change like a comprehensive search for new leadership. We’re gratified and impressed that AWLA’s Board didn’t take the easy way out by hiring someone with prior connections to the organization. Instead they executed a national search and were able to attract a candidate with impressive credentials.

Next month the work begins. If Neil Trent is as capable as Bonney Brown at Nevada Humane, he’ll likely pursue many of the same steps that she outlines in her summary of how NHS became one of the country’s most effective open-admission shelters.

Given Arlington’s much smaller scale and AWLA’s resources, the job should be easier here. Welcome, Neil. We’re eagerly awaiting the start of the transformation.

What’s Possible
What’s Possible, Part Two

Arlington’s Homeless Dogs

shelterhawk — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:13:01 +0000

In the first six months of this year, AWLA took in 210 homeless dogs. Here’s what happened to them, juxtaposed against how AWLA’s homeless dogs fared in 2009:

% of homeless dogs	Jan-June 2010	Jan-Dec 2009
Adopted	59.0%	66.7%
Transferred	7.1%	2.2%
Killed	33.8%	30.0%

The jump in the transfer rate is good news, but the other changes are in the wrong direction. The 71 homeless dogs that AWLA killed in the first half of this year were a mix of “owner-surrenders” (40), returned dogs (8), strays (13), transfers (2), and quarantines (1). Also among the 71 are “owner-requested euthanasias” (7) for dogs under five years old, including a one-year-old Rottweiler and a six-month-old pitbull. It seems likely that these young OREs were either misclassified or healthy enough to be rehabilitated. Of these intake categories, transfers had the best chance (88%) of making it out of the AWLA shelter alive, and strays had the worst survival odds (61%). Returned dogs had a low adoption rate but by far the highest transfer rate, implying that AWLA felt some kind of responsibility toward these dogs that it had previously placed in unsuccessful homes. Because an owner-surrendered dog is not “lost”, and because no statutory holding period applies for these dogs, most of them were never listed on AWLA’s website. Six dogs were killed within hours of being surrendered by their owners. The average tenure for killed owner-surrenders was six days. While AWLA killed strays at an even higher rate than owner-surrenders, it was compelled to post them on its website and hold them for at least five days first. Some were offered for adoption and listed online for several weeks. Others spent days or weeks hidden from adopters but listed on the “stray or found dogs” page of AWLA’s website. Here are photos of a few of the stray dogs that AWLA ultimately killed: Josie Mocha Rasta Neal Pierson Desiree Stucky Molly Josie: f American bulldog, 3 months Mocha: f pitbull, 5 months Rasta: m pitbull mix, 4 months Neal: m German shepherd mix, 5 months Pierson: m pitbull, 1 year Desiree: f pitbull, 2 years Stucky: m pitbull-lab mix, 8 months Molly: f chihuahua, 1 year If “pitbull” seems to be the most common breed of dog that AWLA kills, that’s only partly because AWLA receives a lot of pitbulls. It’s mainly because AWLA uses the term pitbull liberally to describe the dogs it receives (many mixed breed dogs are characterized as “pitbull mix”) and because AWLA kills almost all of the pitbulls it receives. During the first six months of this year, AWLA received 30 pitbulls. Five were adopted out. Three of these were puppies (and not really pitbulls), one was eight months old, and the lucky fifth was four years old. The other 26 pitbulls were killed, at an average age of 20 months. Eight of these dogs were 10 months old or younger. The youngest was only four months old. If this isn’t a de facto breed ban, it’s pretty close. AWLA doesn’t use its website (or Craigs List or Twitter or e-mail or any other form of digital broadcast) to attract prospective adopters and rescue organizations on behalf of the dogs it later kills. As mentioned in a previous post, this may be because pronouncing that “Josie’s last day is Wednesday!” would undermine the image it wants to project to potential donors. So instead Josie just disappeared from the AWLA website when she was killed on Jan 31, twelve days after she arrived at the shelter. And because AWLA doesn’t actively promote its on-view dogs, these dogs sit in their kennels for weeks on end while a trickle of visitors passes through the dog room. Meanwhile, local rescue organizations are staging and publicizing adoption events where the dogs in their foster homes can strut their stuff to the community. And as a result of their efforts, these rescue groups with a fraction of AWLA’s resources are sending more dogs home: Dogs Adopted Out, 2009 Lost Dog Rescue Foundation: 1,621 Homeward Trails: 816 A Forever Home: 767 AWLA: 340 Foster programs, adoption events, publicizing the dogs it wants to transfer out — it’s not rocket science. Across the country, the most effective open-admission shelters implement these proven-successful tactics that AWLA continues to ignore. For Arlington’s homeless dogs, the clock keeps ticking. How many more will die before AWLA starts working harder on their behalf?

Delaware Changes Everything

shelterhawk — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:48:27 +0000

On July 23, Governor Jack Markel signed Senate Bill 280, thereby establishing Delaware as a national model for the compassionate treatment of homeless companion animals.

Modeled on the No Kill Advocacy Center’s Companion Animal Protection Act, Senate Bill 280 amends Chapter 80 of the Delaware Code by specifying how animal shelters must handle unclaimed animals. The new language includes the following mandates regarding euthanasia and outcomes transparency.

***

§8004. Euthanasia in Animal Shelters.

(b) Animal shelters shall ensure that the following conditions are met before an animal is euthanized:

(i) The holding period for the animal required by this chapter is expired;

(ii) There are no empty cages, kennels, or other living environments in the shelter that are suitable for the animal;

(iii) The animal cannot share a cage or kennel with appropriately sized primary living space with another animal;

(iv) A foster home is not available;

(v) Organizations on the registry developed pursuant to §8003(d) are not willing to accept the animal; and

(vi) The animal care/control manager certifies that the above conditions are met and that he/she has no other reasonable alternative.

§8007. Record Keeping and Reporting.

Animal shelters shall maintain records regarding the following information:

(a) Intake rate;

(b) Euthanasia rate including age, by animal;

(d) Number reclaimed by owner;

(e) Number transferred to other agencies for adoption;

(f) Number of spay/neuters;

(g) Number of animals in shelter;

(h) Records showing the number of animals that died or were lost/stolen;

(i) Records showing compliance with vaccination requirements; and

(j) Records regarding medical treatment provided.

The information in subsections (a) through (g) shall be posted to the shelter’s website on a quarterly basis. The information in subsections (h), (i),and (j) shall be made available upon request by appropriate authorities.

***

For reasons explained in our posts on Oreo’s Law and outcomes transparency, this legislation changes everything. By prohibiting open-admission shelters in Delaware from killing homeless cats and dogs simply because that’s the easiest thing to do, and because that’s what they’ve always done, the Delaware Companion Animal Protection Act will save thousands of animals every year. The new legislation will energize Delaware’s animal-rescue organizations by making them indispensable to fulfilling the requirements of the law, and by highlighting Delaware as the model for other states.

As Delaware demonstrates during the next few years that the foot-draggers are wrong — and that sometimes euthanasia is the most humane choice is a false and self-absolving platitude when shelters kill healthy cats and dogs despite empty cages and foster homes — more legislation like Delaware’s CAPA is inevitable.

It will reach Arlington too, the sooner the better. AWLA should recognize that the future is not far away (in this case, only about 100 miles), and that within a few years its current practices will be both unthinkable and illegal. As AWLA searches for a new leader, it should insist on someone who will get in front of this wave rather than keep trying to resist it.

Where Have All the Kittens Gone?

shelterhawk — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:19:55 +0000

One of AWLA’s kitten fosterers recently mentioned to us that the shelter didn’t seem to be receiving the steady stream of abandoned kittens that usually begins in April and continues into the fall. We speculated that maybe the winter blizzards had taken a toll on the feral cat population, or that maybe years of spay/neuter efforts by the local animal-welfare community were starting to pay off.

Curious about this absence of kittens, we sent AWLA a written request for their intake and disposition records for cats and dogs for the first six months of 2010. Section 3.2-6557 of the Virginia Code compels AWLA to make these records available for public inspection. AWLA responded by sending the records promptly (probably because when they refused to do this two years ago, they were taken to court by the requester and ordered to comply by the judge.)

The cover letter enclosed with the records provided the helpful information that:

AWLA is a private non-profit corporation founded in 1944 to improve the welfare of stray, abused, and neglected animals in Northern Virginia. AWLA is not a public body under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) and, accordingly, nothing in AWLA’s response to your Request shall be deemed to subject AWLA to the requirements of FOIA.

OK, we get it; AWLA will fulfill the minimum requirements of the law when Arlington residents inquire about the welfare of the animals it is entrusted to care for with taxpayer funds — but don’t ask for any additional information. When we asked AWLA to include the animal ID numbers with the records, they refused. That makes analyzing the intake/disposition records much more difficult.

As we flipped through the records, the sad truth about this year’s crop of kittens emerged. Between March 28 and June 21, AWLA received 40 kittens that were younger than two months old. Three of them died at the shelter, and the other 37 were euthanized. How many of the 40 kittens were transferred to foster care? None.

During the same time period, AWLA also received 17 kittens that were two or three months old. Of these, one was euthanized and the other 16 were adopted, all within 10 days of their arrival at the shelter. The 16 survivors were old enough to be offered for adoption without spending time in foster care. Since losing one kitten out of 17 is a casualty rate that approximates the survival odds most rescued kittens face, we’ll give AWLA the benefit of the doubt with that kitten.

But when 40 out of 40 young and newborn kittens perish, the word “euthanization” no longer applies — especially when the vast majority of them were dead within hours of their arrival at the shelter. Some of these kittens may have been sick, but my five years of kitten fostering has taught me that most sick kittens recover fully with basic TLC and common medications — the very treatment that foster homes are happy to provide. I’ve seen ten-ounce kittens recover from diarrhea, vomiting, hypoglycemic shock, 107-degree fevers, and severe upper-respiratory infections. What they need is encouragement and a chance.

The likelihood is that most of the kittens entrusted to AWLA’s care were healthy. They just weren’t weaned yet, and they needed to be bottle-fed. That’s what kitten-fostering programs are for. AWLA has over 30 kitten fosterers, yet it couldn’t manage to actually utilize them when the need arose. Maybe because AWLA’s volunteer coordinator left her job earlier this year and the position remained vacant for a while.

Whatever the reason, AWLA’s indiscriminate killing of this year’s bottle-babies represents both a sickening step backward from prior years and an insidious betrayal:

- of the citizens who thought they were “rescuing” kittens by bringing them to the Arlington shelter;

- of the kitten fosterers who trusted AWLA to let them help save orphaned and abandoned kittens;

- of the donors who contribute based on the false belief that AWLA tries to save needy kittens;

- of AWLA’s own asserted mission to improve the welfare of stray, abused, and neglected animals in Northern Virginia.

One fosterer said that when she inquired about the dearth of kittens recently, a shelter staffer told her that they’d been referring kitten-finders to other shelters or rescue organizations. If that’s true, then AWLA wasn’t just betraying its constituents — it was also lying to them.

Clearly, the culture of stonewalling, elision, and path-of-least-effort at AWLA didn’t entirely disappear with the departure of the former Executive Director. When her replacement arrives, we retain some hope that the culture can be converted into one that truly values the lives of Arlington’s neediest companion animals.

That will take a leader who is willing to perform a thorough house-cleaning at AWLA. Any staff member who can rationalize AWLA’s recent treatment of bottle-baby kittens has no place in a well-managed open-admission shelter. Too many innocent animals pay for that ambivalence and lack of compassion with their lives.

The Root of the Problem

shelterhawk — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:26:30 +0000

In its fiscal 2009, AWLA received $1,229,326 from Arlington County to perform animal control and manage Arlington’s open-admission animal shelter.

But as a private non-profit organization, AWLA also raised $1,031,897 in charitable contributions. Along with depreciation of $91,162, those contributions resulted in positive cash flow of $500,000 in fiscal 2009. If AWLA were a for-profit organization, its EBITDA would be an enviable 20% of revenue.

What is AWLA doing with the $500,000 it generated in fiscal 2009 (or the $632,000 it generated in fiscal 2008?) Is the money being used to save more homeless animals?

Based on the number of cats and dogs that AWLA found homes for or transferred to rescue during the last four fiscal years…

2009 — 1,098
2008 — 1,029
2007 — 1,049
2006 — 1,073

…it’s hard to see a correlation between positive cash flow and improvement in animal outcomes.

Could that be because fundraising is AWLA’s top priority, and saving homeless animals comes second?

I think this is an endemic problem when a private SPCA, humane society, or animal-welfare league handles animal control and manages an open-admission shelter under contract with a municipal government. The league (or SPCA, or HS) views every action it takes through the lens of how it might affect fundraising efforts.

Animals successfully placed in adoptive homes help the league generate contributions by providing happy-ending anecdotes and adding potential donors (the adopters) to the mailing list. But animals the league can’t find homes for — and ultimately kills instead — represent failure. If publicized, these killings diminish the league’s reputation and undermine charitable contributions. So it’s no surprise that happy endings are trumpeted on the league’s website and in newsletters sent to donors, while euthanasia statistics are buried in obscure tables, if they’re provided at all.

Domino is off-view at AWLA. What happens next?

Why doesn’t the league encourage rescue groups to take animals that it can’t or won’t adopt out? As municipally-run shelters have learned, the best way to get the attention of resource-constrained local rescue groups is to broadcast an e-mail with a picture of Rosie the coonhound saying “Rosie’s time is up tomorrow! Can anyone PLEASE give her another chance?”

If the league did that, its fundraising appeals would trigger cognitive dissonance. They would be heard in the context of stories about death-row dogs being pulled from the league-managed shelter, rehabilitated by a rescue group, and adopted into a loving home… anecdotes demonstrating that due to their willingness to invest time and money, the rescue groups were succeeding where the league had failed. Why wouldn’t the charitable contribtutions then start swinging toward the rescue groups instead of the league?

Taken to an extreme, if rescue groups were given access to all stray and surrendered cats and dogs received by the league’s open-admission shelter, maybe a network of these groups would eventually pull all the healthy and treatable animals, leaving the league essentially responsible for animal control and euthanasia of the least adoptable animals. That’s a hard story to sell to potential donors.

So at some level, non-profits that handle animal control and manage an open-admission shelter have an incentive to hold rescue organizations at arm’s length, and to simultaneously hide statistics on the number of animals they end up killing.

By contrast, an open-admission shelter funded entirely by the municipal government doesn’t pursue charitable contributions, so it doesn’t have the same motivation to hide euthanasia statistics. It can blast out Rosie’s picture with the caption “only three days left!” to spur a response from rescue groups that already have their hands full.

Knowing that it has limited ability to find homes for the animals in its care, a municipal shelter has every incentive to offer animals to any rescue group willing to take them; each cat or dog pulled is one fewer animal the shelter has to care for, or eventually kill. The municipal shelter doesn’t have to worry that transferring an animal might also mean transferring a possible happy ending — and a possible stream of charitable contributions — along with it.

This perceived conflict between the goals of maximizing charitable contributions and saving as many homeless animals as possible is, in my view, a core reason that non-profits like the AWLAs of Arlington and Alexandria and the Montgomery County Humane Society save a much lower percentage of their homeless animals than organizations that collaborate closely with the municipal pound but don’t manage it — like Richmond SPCA and the Nevada Humane Society.

RSPCA and NHS don’t have to worry about killing unwanted surrenders or strays. Instead they focus on pulling as many animals as they can from the pound, then use proven programs like foster care and adoption events to find homes for them, on the assumption that if they save enough animals, the fundraising will take care of itself.

That seems like the best approach. Let the local government manage animal control and maintain the municipal shelter. And give a full spectrum of animal welfare organizations — from SPCAs and humane societies managing limited-admission shelters to foster-care networks to breed-specific rescue groups — access to all the stray and surrendered cats and dogs, so they can pull, nurture, and promote any animal.

Killing animals without giving anyone a chance to save them is inhumane. Every homeless cat or dog consigned to a shelter that kills unwanted animals at least deserves the chance to be seen by everyone who might be willing to help.

Vision

shelterhawk — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:32:59 +0000

From the About Us page of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals:

Founded in 2002, The Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals is a non-profit, public-private partnership of over 160 animal rescue groups and shelters working with the City of New York toward the day when no New York City dog or cat of reasonable health and temperament is killed merely because he or she does not have a home.

Since the Mayor’s Alliance was formed in 2002, the publicly-funded Animal Care and Control of New York City has received roughly 40,000 homeless cats and dogs each year — and managed to cut its euthanization rate for cats and dogs by more than half, thanks to its partnership with the Mayor’s Alliance.

According to ShelterWatch.org, NYACC and AWLA now have almost identical live-release rates for homeless dogs (68.8% for AWLA, 68.7% for NYACC.) But AWLA has made no progress on its live-release rate since 2006, so NYACC should surpass AWLA this year as it continues working toward the Mayor's Alliance goal of making NYC a no-kill community by 2015.

Here are links to the Mayor’s Alliance 2009 progress report, and a recent edition of their E-Newsletter.

The essential difference between organizations like those participating in the Mayor’s Alliance in New York (or in similar alliances in San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and elsewhere) and municipally-funded non-profits like AWLA (Arlington), AWLA (Alexandria), and the Montgomery County Humane Society is one of vision, commitment, and effort on behalf of homeless animals.

Open-admission shelters in New York and other forward-looking cities have it, while their counterparts in the affluent suburbs of Washington, DC still do not.

How They Did It

shelterhawk — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:52:51 +0000

After holding management positions at progressive animal-rescue organizations Best Friends Animal Society and Alley Cat Allies, Bonney Brown joined the Nevada Humane Society as Executive Director in 2006. She and the NHS Board were determined to convert NHS from an open-admission shelter that killed most of the homeless animals it received into an open-admission shelter with one of the country’s highest live-release rates.

This brochure summarizes how they did it.

AWLA could use the ten steps listed as a blueprint for how to improve its own results. While all of the steps are important, these two seem especially relevant to AWLA:

3. Invest time and assets in lifesaving. Review every program in terms of its lifesaving impact. If a given program did not significantly and immediately contribute to saving lives, then we gave a hard look at letting it go. Though a program may be a nice thing to do, until we are saving all the animals that can be saved, we have a responsibility to ensure that we focus our resources and attention on creating a true safety net for homeless animals of the community — not next year, but right now.

We… eliminated several humane education projects in order to focus on getting the community immediately involved in saving lives.

For AWLA this could mean scrapping non-lifesaving programs like dog-manners classes and Kids Camp, and choosing instead to host adoption events in concert with rescue organizations or to expand its foster program to include adult dogs and cats.

4. Inspire and Involve the Community. Make a public declaration. While the idea of making a public declaration to become a no-kill community may be intimidating, the declaration itself actually has a powerful effect. Not only does it focus your internal efforts on the no-kill community goal, but it helps inspire and energize the community to support what you do.

To inspire animal lovers to get involved, you need to invite them to be part of something big, exciting, and worth the effort. So declaring an all-out effort to create a no-kill community is an important step in getting the support you need to make it happen.

This is the leap of faith that AWLA’s next Executive Director must already understand or be willing to make. Asking more of the community — asking it to help AWLA make Arlington a national leader in its treatment of homeless animals — will unleash a flood of untapped effort and resources. If AWLA challenges Arlington residents to help it save every homeless animal it receives, and then focuses its efforts on productively managing an army of volunteers, it won’t need to spend its time on fundraising events like Walk for the Animals and Catsino Night.

People like to associate with and contribute to winning organizations. If AWLA becomes one, the fundraising will take care of itself.

Transparency

shelterhawk — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:44:38 +0000

Comments we’ve received from an AWLA volunteer on our last two posts suggest that maybe we’ve been too optimistic about the rate at which AWLA is improving its efforts on behalf of homeless animals. A culture of stonewalling and inertia is hard to change, especially when most of the management team responsible for it remains in place.

How will we know when AWLA shifts its raison d’etre to saving as many homeless animals as it can from whatever its top priority is now (fundraising?)

1. AWLA will actively recruit foster homes for its long-tenured cats and dogs, not just its kittens and puppies.

2. AWLA will use its ample resources to pull more dogs from high-kill shelters, and then involve its dogs in community events on a regular basis.

3. Dogs like Leo won’t be stashed in off-view kennels for weeks on end, where adopters can’t meet them and volunteers are prohibited from walking them.

4. AWLA will implement Oreo’s Law.

5. And AWLA will commit itself to outcomes transparency for its homeless animals.

Here’s what transparency looks like at the Humane Society of Berks County in Reading, PA.

HSBC has fewer resources than AWLA, but it handles more cats and dogs and works much harder on behalf of those animals. And it encourages feedback and suggestions from its volunteers and constituents. If you spend 15 or 20 minutes comparing the AWLA and HSBC websites, you’ll realize that the motivations of the two organizations are fundamentally different.

AWLA could learn a lot from peers like this. Let’s hope its next Executive Director agrees.