Best Friends and ASPCA make historic joint commitment to Los Angeles animals
Drum roll, please ... Best Friends and the ASPCA are joining forces in Los Angeles, and together we're committing $14 million over three years to help transform one of the largest shelter systems in the country: LA Animal Services. Three organizations, one city, and a partnership on a scale that has never been seen.
If the City Council approves this investment, and I believe they will, we will place staffed consultants directly inside LA Animal Services (LAAS), expand foster and adoption programs, strengthen return-to-home efforts, grow leadership capacity, and coordinate community cat programming to save more lives than ever before. This is not a simple grant nor a one-time infusion. It's a long-term structural commitment built at the city's request and under the purview of LAAS — ultimately LAAS owns this program — and it sets out to prove that the largest, most complex shelter systems in this country can succeed.
This first-of-its-kind collaboration is designed to provide targeted, immediate support for LAAS while building long-term solutions from within to provide care, increase support staff, and save more lives. Together, Best Friends and the ASPCA will work alongside LAAS leadership to elevate outcomes for two- and four-legged Angelenos for a more humane city.
Best Friends has pet adoption centers and network partners all across the country, but L.A. is where so much of our organization’s early history was written. Co-founders Francis and Silva were there in the 1990s sharing the no-kill message when shelters were places many, many animals didn’t leave alive. Their early work helped build relationships for what would become the NKLA (No-Kill Los Angeles) Coalition and proved that one of the largest cities in the country could become a national model for what no-kill looks like at scale. When the wildfires tore through L.A. last year and the animals in its shelters needed emergency support, we showed up then too, moving more than 1,700 animals to safety alongside our partners.
And yet, even with all that history, I want to be honest: This partnership represents something totally new. Working together for L.A. in a crisis is one thing. Placing ourselves structurally inside one of the largest and most complex shelter systems in the country and committing resources at this scale for this long is another. Doing it alongside the ASPCA makes it something else entirely. We're two organizations with different histories and different strengths. Yet in L.A., we looked at what needed to get done to save more lives and came to the same conclusion: It has to happen together. I’d like to extend a massive thank-you to Suzanne Kogut and Petco Love for their role in bringing our two organizations together — we couldn’t do this without you.
And while this commitment is to Los Angeles, the vision here is bigger than one city. LAAS takes in tens of thousands of animals every year. When a system of that size is strained, the entire ecosystem feels it. Stabilizing L.A. is, first and foremost, the right thing to do. But it’s also a part of how we help everywhere else. What we build here — the staffing models, the foster infrastructure, the community cat coordination, the leadership frameworks — becomes a blueprint.
When it works in one of the most complex, high-volume shelter systems in the country ... there’s your proof point — proof that other cities, other mayors, other councils can look at and say: We can do that. L.A. has always been one of the most powerful proof points this movement has. And now, L.A. is about to show the country what it looks like when that commitment gets reinforced, deepened, and built to last.
If you’re in Los Angeles, contact your city council member now and let them know you support this proposal. Not an Angeleno? You can still support these efforts by signing this petition.
More details are coming soon, and I can't wait to share those — follow me on Instagram where I’ll be updating with the latest goings-on. Today, I just wanted to share this significant moment with you because a moment like this belongs to all of us. Los Angeles, let’s go.
-Julie
P.S. Los Angeles is a city near and dear to my heart. If you’re curious, read more here.
