Connecting animal shelters to save the lives of cats and dogs
The Best Friends shelter collaborative program (officially named the Prince and Paws Shelter Collaborative after the beloved pets of the program’s principal investor) pairs mentors from no-kill shelters with their colleagues from shelters that aren’t yet no-kill.
The peer mentors offer their hard-earned expertise, along with lifesaving techniques, training and other forms of support, to shelter fellows to help them achieve no-kill. And Best Friends is there to provide support to both.
How the program works
Using the latest data, Best Friends identifies and strategically pairs shelters that have achieved a 90% save rate (the benchmark for no-kill) with shelters that need help in reaching the no-kill threshold.
After being paired with a shelter using the pet lifesaving dashboard data, the shelter fellows work with their peer mentors to look at current shelter data and come up with a plan and a budget for programming to increase the fellow’s save rate during the 12-month partnership. Best Friends doesn’t dictate what the relationships should look like because the goal is to encourage peer mentors to do what they do well without restrictions.
There are also financial incentives for participating in this perpetuating loop of lifesaving. Best Friends offers seed grants to help the mentors help their fellows and provides ongoing training and coaching to shelter collaborative partners.
These grants can be used for a variety of purposes, including hiring additional staffing, covering medical and surgical expenses, paying for supplies, and financing travel for shelter visits and conferences. And for those organizations that maintain a 90% save rate for six months, there’s a bonus grant awaiting both sides of the collaboration.
In the first year of the program, participating shelters saw a 40% increase in save rate and a 71% reduction in the number of dogs and cats killed, on average.