Editorial: Keeping shelters open when money & time are tight

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2009:

 

 

Editorial: Keeping shelters open when money & time are tight

 

 

The good economic news from the nonprofit

information-tracking web site Guidestar is that only 52% of U.S.

charities reported declining donations during the winter of

2008-2009. This was no worse than the rate of decline during the

preceding summer.

Animal charities appear to have enjoyed less severe declines

than those serving other sectors, but since animal charities raise

only about 1% of total contributions to charity in the U.S., even

moderate losses hurt.

Economic analysts now predict that we may have reached a

turnaround. Yet even in the most hopeful scenario, fall and winter

budgets must be planned conservatively. If more money arrives than

is expected, more can be done, but meanwhile it is prudent to avoid

becoming over-extended. If we are not yet coming out of the

recession of the past two years, the recent stresses on animal

shelters will only get worse.

The influx of " foreclosure pets " that many shelters

experienced in 2007-2008 has been slowed by a decline in

foreclosures, but shelters now have fewer resources to cope with

additional intake. Shelters that had reserves to fall back on have

often reached legally mandated limits on their ability to draw down

endowments, like the Massachusetts SPCA and Pennsylvania SPCA.

Still affluent on paper, both have recently turned shelters over to

other charities due to constricted cash flow.

Other nonprofit shelters have simply depleted their reserves.

Shelters that had good credit two years ago may now have problematic

deficits.

Shelters operated by public agencies are typically having to

work with less, even when their own revenues have held even or

increased, because mortgage defaults, unsold property, and failing

businesses have reduced tax revenues in their communities. This has

in turn meant reduced animal control allocations.

Shelter directors have already struggled for many months to

cut costs in any way possible. Few had funding surpluses even before

the recession began. More than half of all U.S. animal shelters

operate on less than $300,000 per year. More than 85% of U.S.

animal shelters operate on less than $1 million per year: less than

the sales volume of almost any supermarket. After seven years of

record economic growth, U.S. animal shelters at the beginning of

the recession were still only raising about $6.50 per U.S. resident

per year, or about $20 per household, and under $100 per active

donor.

There just was not much fat to trim out of animal shelter

budgets in the first place.

The hardest part of making budget cuts in humane work,

especially hands-on animal care, is that almost any cut one makes

amounts to deciding which animals will go without help.

Budget-cutting may involve only looking at numbers on a computer

screen, not looking into the eyes of an imploring animal and people

bringing the animal to the shelter in hopes of a happy outcome, but

no shelter manager looks at the numbers without knowing the meaning

of doing fewer sterilization surgeries, less adoption advertising,

or laying off staff, who usually work for low wages and have little

or nothing to fall back on.

As last resort before introducing layoffs, shelters often

cut back their hours of public access. Remaining open to the public

for longer hours requires keeping public service personnel on duty

for more hours. This is much more costly than just employing night

clean-up staff, who may not be fluent in English and are usually not

trained in other aspects of shelter work.

Most large shelters have some night staff, especially those

that hold animal control contracts and may be called upon to accept

impounds at any hour when police encounter animals who must be taken

into custody. Night is often the best time to do cleaning and

repairs, and euthanasia technicians tend to believe their work is

less stressful to the animals at night.

Yet remaining open to the public is more difficult than

opening a door in response to a police call. Night security issues

for shelters in out-of-the-way places and rough neighborhoods are

already huge, even behind locked gates. Fifteen to 20 years ago

shelter break-ins by people trying to steal or recover impounded

animals were rare, but shelters in vulnerable locations were

frequent targets of break-ins by addicts trying to steal cash,

pentobarbital, and ketamine. Those problems have not subsided, but

now break-ins to steal or recover impounded animals are so common

that ANIMAL PEOPLE has received reports of more than 60 cases in the

past three years, probably just a fraction of all those that have

occurred. Among them were 18 cases of suspected dogfighters trying

to take pit bull terriers from shelters.

To safely remain open after hours, a shelter may need to

have multiple personnel on duty who are able to keep track of each

other and respond quickly to distress paging.

Then there is the problem of providing the particular service

that the public might expect to find after hours. Having a

veterinary technician on duty to receive injured animals is more

costly than having a cleaning crew. Having an intake counselor who

is trained to calm irate people and go through a checklist of

possibilities for keeping an animal in a home may be more costly

still. Offering after-hours adoptions requires having someone on

duty with yet another skill set. Sometimes a vet tech can double as

an intake and adoption counselor, as is often done at smaller

shelters, but if a shelter requires personnel to handle multiple

specialized roles in the daytime, it usually doesn't have anyone to

work a night shift.

The counter-argument is that after hours are often when

humane services are most needed. A domestic crisis that results in a

pet being surrendered to a shelter is most likely to occur after

hours. Animal abuse or abandonment is more likely to occur when no

one is on call to intervene and there is nowhere safe to take the

animal, even for an overnight cooling off period. Nights and

weekends are also when lonely people are most likely to feel the urge

to adopt an animal companion.

None of this is unknown to the humane community. Shelters

today are still open to the public. on average, for only the 20 to

30 hours per week that they were open a generation ago, but the

distribution of public reception hours has markedly shifted from the

" banking hours " that prevailed then to retail hours now. Checking

hours at more than 30 open admission shelters in 25 cities, ANIMAL

PEOPLE recently found that more than 90% are open on Saturdays, more

than half are open on Sundays, and more than half are open to at

least six p.m. on three or more weekdays.

Shelter directors are often quite aware that if they could

remain open for longer, they could accomplish more program service.

Mike Arms, as shelter manager for the North Shore Animal League,

demonstrated with the Pet Adopt-a-thon held each May that people will

adopt animals 24 hours a day if they know they can. The North Shore

Animal League has expanded the Pet Adopt-a-thon into an international

event. What works in the New York City suburbs turns out to work in

Europe, Japan, and the developing world as well.

Arms, after becoming executive director of the Helen

Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, California, introduced

Home-4-the-Holidays to comparably demonstrate the value of offering

adoptions at other times when shelters are normally closed or keeping

only restricted hours--and has achieved another global success.

Brenda Barnette, now heading the Humane Society of Seattle,

demonstrated as executive director of Pets In Need in Redwood City

that night humane education classes for adults could be a big hit,

promoted as guest speaker appearances, and could morph into

fundraising events.

The San Francisco SPCA, under Richard Avanzino, who now

heads Maddie's Fund, more than 25 years ago introduced a 24-hour pet

crisis intervention hotline with multilingual counselors on call.

Several other humane societies have more recently enjoyed success by

partnering with other 24-hour crisis intervention services, so that

if a domestic violence crisis involves an animal, someone with

appropriate animal expertise can help.

Handling after-hours emergencies is less expensive, on a

case-by-case basis, than coping with the consequences of delay until

a shelter is again open. Yet there is considerable after-hours down

time, and keeping the necessary personnel on duty at the shelter

during the down time is prohibitive, even when the shelter has the

personnel to put on late shifts.

Coping with a budget crunch, almost any shelter director can

look at the numbers and see that cutting hours looks relatively

painless compared to the alternatives. Since only about 20% of the

animals coming to shelters these days are brought by the public,

keeping shorter public access hours appears likely to have little

effect on intake volume. Since shelters often do more than half of

their total adoption volume on Saturdays, discontinuing adoption

hours on Mondays or Tuesdays appears to be reasonable.

But what is economically reasonable and perhaps even

essential may not be in keeping with donor expectations, or with the

message a humane society hopes to impart to the public about the kind

of around-the-clock care that animals need and deserve.

 

The residential solution

 

This is not a new dilemma. Ironically, the humane societies

of more than 100 years ago and those of today in the developing world

were and are well ahead of the present U.S. humane community in

confronting and resolving it.

The oldest animal shelter in the U.S. that still operates

from the original premises appears to be the Ellen Gifford Home in

the Boston suburbs. Ellen Gifford renovated her family's carriage

house into a cat shelter in 1881. She lived for the rest of her life

in the adjacent family residence, which is to this day the residence

of the shelter manager.

The Ellen Gifford Home has thus had resident staff for longer

than any other U.S. shelter. What was unusual about that arrangement

then was that it had only one resident caretaker, instead of

multiple caretakers on rotating shifts--but it was always a very

small shelter.

The Mohawk & Hudson Humane Society, in the Albany suburb of

Menands, New York, was by contrast among the biggest in the entire

U.S. when the oldest part of the present shelter opened in 1913.

Operating an orphanage as well as animal care facilities, it housed

about 10,000 children and 20,000 animals per year, attended by a

resident staff of dozens, and hosted the offices of the American

Humane Association for a time, too. The Mohawk & Hudson Humane

Society retained some resident staff until 1993, when the last

resident staff housing was condemned and demolished.

The advent of the automobile gradually ended the tradition of

resident animal shelter staff in the U.S., which persisted only at

zoos and sanctuaries for exotic species. Once workers could commute

efficiently, few people wanted to reside amid barking dogs and

animal smells, on constant call, in a place where for most of the

20th century most of the animals would soon be killed.

But having resident staff is still more the rule than the

exception abroad. Dogs Trust, of Britain, is known for attracting

employees to shelters in upscale neighborhoods by offering them

cottages or townhouse apartments on the premises. The

accommodations are much nicer than any that most shelter workers

could afford to rent or buy within easy commuting distance. Shelters

in India frequently include both " officers' quarters " for senior

night supervisors and visiting veterinarians, and " enlisted

quarters " for animal care staff, who are often themselves rescue

projects. Shelters in continental Europe--both east and

west--commonly include small apartments for residential volunteers.

Many of the overnight residents at foreign shelters are not

regular staff, nor even trained personnel. But they are people who

can call regular staff if someone arrives with a crisis after hours.

A constant human presence is reassuring to donors and the public,

and probably to the animals, too. Efforts are made to keep the

residential quarters attractive, as well as secure, and because

most shelters with residential quarters usually have more than one

person staying overnight, backup help is at hand in a crisis.

U.S. shelters are unlikely to retrofit to add residential

quarters in the near future, not least because many are not zoned to

accommodate humans; but residential quarters are a perk to consider

in designing new shelters, especially in communities where housing

is hard to find at humane workers' wages. Shelter architecture and

operating procedures have improved to the point that a well-managed

shelter environment can be a congenial place to live, and many

personnel might consider being on call as needed after hours much

less stressful than fighting traffic before and after every shift.

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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