Woman in glasses standing outside with plants surrounding her, holding a grey dog upside as it smiles at the camera.

The 2026 Foster Forward Challenge

Together we can get more pets into foster homes! Engage more folks in your community and save more lives.

Are you looking for an opportunity to increase the number of pets going into foster homes? Here's the challenge you’ve been waiting for!

You can boost adoptions by as much as 20 percentage points by expanding your foster programs and involving foster families with processing adoptions — and even more if you fully empower fosters!

To help you harness the great power of fostering, this June we're launching the Foster Forward Challenge to get more cats and dogs into foster homes and help communities across the country reach no-kill.

The challenge is aimed at helping you expand your foster programming to save more pets in your community, especially when collaborating with your local shelter.

We’ll support you every step of the way, with resources and toolkits to implement the foster practices and communicate with your community!

Registration for the challenge is now closed. Email communications will be sent to challenge participants beginning the week of May 4.

The impact of the challenge was incredible. We surpassed our metrics from last year in all categories; fostering animals, adopting animals, both for cats and dogs, and adding new volunteers during this time frame. We are going to continue implementing the open adoption policies and fostering policies.

— Chandler Giddes, Thomasville Thomas County Humane Society. Bring Love Home 2024 Challenge Participant. 113% improvement in total placements.

Imagine when you get to give your own testimonial about all the pets who found homes because of your participation in the Foster Forward Challenge!

Foster Forward Challenge requirements:

Be a Best Friends Network Partner — If you're not already a network partner, learn about joining today
Provide monthly 2025 and 2026 data through June 2026 by July 13, 2026, in Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) — New to SPDA? Find out more about our free data platform
Demonstrate at least a 1% improvement in dogs and/or cats fostered in June 2026 compared to June 2025

Participants must also implement at least one (or more!) of the following practices the entire month of June 2026. You can pick from one or multiple categories:

To increase recruitment, pick one of these practices:
- Pop-up foster orientation events (virtual or in-person)
- Implement multilingual foster applications and support
- Offer same day fostering opportunities
- Eliminate home checks and landlord checks for fosters
To help high-need pets, pick one of these practices:
- Offer specialized foster training and programming for high-need pet populations
To remove bottlenecks, pick one of these practices:
- Allow fosters to market foster animals and facilitate meet & greets
- Allow fosters to process adoptions completely
To try a new kind of program, pick one of these practices:
- Create a “virtual foster program” for pet marketing
- Start a short-term foster or foster-to-adopt program
- Help finders foster lost pets while they seek the owner (must partner with the local municipal shelter to implement)

Learn more about these practices here.

Along with the requirements, these are some add-ons you’re also encouraged to do:

Ask your local shelter how you can be of greatest impact with transfers by diversifying your foster population and pulling at-risk animals
Use foster recruitment marketing materials four times
Share fostering resources online

Resources & materials:

We’re here to support you.

Together, we can help cats and dogs find their way into loving foster homes and help communities across the country reach no-kill, collaborating with local shelters and engaging people in saving lives.

Please reach out to our team if you have any questions on the challenge.

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Event