Best Friends and Miami-Dade team up to tackle shelter crowding
If you’ve ever been to Miami, you know it is massive in both size and in heart. One of the largest cities in Florida, it serves as a hub for commerce and transportation for the entire region. It’s also home to one of our nation’s largest animal sheltering systems. And in recent years, that system — Miami-Dade Animal Services (MDAS) — has faced a massive spike in dogs needing care. On any given day, about 700 dogs are in care, with 600 on-site. That scale makes the work complex, the stakes high, and the solutions both urgent and sustainable.
At Best Friends, we know saving the lives of cats and dogs isn’t about one person or program. It’s about collaboration. As Fraily Rodriguez, Best Friends’ senior director of lifesaving programs, puts it: “Lifesaving is a team sport, and it takes all of us to answer the call.”
That understanding is why Best Friends is going big in Miami through our national shelter embed program.
This initiative, made possible in part by Maddie’s Fund®, places our staff inside animal shelters across the country to help accelerate lifesaving. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder work that involves adopting out animals, coaching staff, refining systems, and building and accelerating tried-and-true lifesaving programs that might otherwise take years to establish.
I have to shout out our embed team that makes enormous sacrifices to do this work. They leave their homes, their families, and the rhythms of their daily lives — sometimes for months at a time — because they believe in going where the need is the greatest and helping shelters see a new way forward.
What makes the MDAS project especially unique is that it’s both a long-term embed and a short-term, large-scale deployment. Alongside our long-term embedded staff, more than 50 Best Friends team members have flown to Miami to work for short stints on the ground at MDAS.
So what does this work look like in practice? It looks like making the visitor experience and the adoption process faster and smoother so that a potential adopter doesn’t leave discouraged due to long lines and wait times. It looks like getting to know the dogs on-site as individuals — and with 600 dogs at their facility, it can be difficult for the MDAS staff to get to know every unique personality. That’s where Best Friends staff come in: Through individual assessments of each dog that are catalogued into their records, MDAS staff can then better facilitate foster placements, rescue group placements, and adoptions.
In practice, this work also looks like supporting innovating programs such as Finder to Foster, which simply asks a person who finds a stray dog whether they’d be willing to foster instead of leaving the pup at the shelter. This one small shift was implemented with Best Friends’ help during this deployment and has already kept numerous dogs out of shelter kennels and in loving foster homes.
The results speak for themselves. Within the first week, foster placements doubled. And to keep the momentum going, the team created an “on-deck” volunteer system to free up MDAS’ single foster coordinator — so one person isn’t carrying hundreds of foster cases alone.
Another early win came from welcoming visitors with an adoptable dog right in the lobby. In the first four days, every single featured dog was adopted or fostered — one had been waiting six months. Sometimes, simply putting a dog where people can meet them changes everything.
Moments like these may feel small against the backdrop of 700 dogs in care, but they’re not. They’re proof that when you change the way people experience a shelter, you unlock lifesaving opportunities that were always there just waiting to be seen.
What makes all of this progress possible is true collaboration. MDAS leadership has been enthusiastic and committed. Best Friends is walking alongside them with expertise, staff power, and creative problem-solving. Together, we’re tackling the sheer scale of the challenge — and the community is responding.
And the momentum is building. On October 18, MDAS will host a massive adoption event with the goal of finding homes for 200 dogs on that single day. Best Friends extended our deployment to help smash that goal.
You may have seen me ask people for their “why” — why do they dedicate themselves to animal welfare? Why did they get involved in animal sheltering or rescue? Why keep going? So, in that spirit, I asked our embed operations manager Emory Groeneveld for hers:
“My why is to be a person on the team who answers the call. If a shelter or an individual raises their hand and says, ‘I need help, I want to try things differently, I want to do better,’ I want to be the person who says, ‘OK, then let’s get it done. I will help you.’”
That’s what this work is all about. No one can do it alone. But when we answer the call together, lives change for the better. Join in and make a difference in your community today.
-Julie
