If you’ve tried everything you can think of to connect with your community, reduced barriers to fostering and adoption, and still animals are sitting in your shelter, you may catch yourself feeling powerless to increase positive outcomes, but you do have the opportunity to make a difference, and it starts with one simple word: Yes! Yes to going further to simplify your adoption process; yes to partnering with the community and engaging in deep listening; and yes to mitigating bias and working to make your communications and materials more inclusive, welcoming, and accessible.
In last week’s Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge webinar, The Power of Yes, California for All Animals State Director Allison Cardona invited us to dig into what might be keeping people who want to foster or adopt from coming to the shelter, and she outlined how we can use these three impactful and untapped practices to encourage engagement across our communities and send more animals home. If you missed this thought-provoking, tip-filled webinar, you can catch the recording here and continue the conversation at Maddie’s Pet Form.
Want to engage more deeply with your staff and start a discussion around how you can lean into the power of these practices at your shelter? Enroll as a team in the short, self-paced online training module (SPOT mod) The Power of Yes! Removing Barriers to Adoption in the Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge Learniverse. While 70% of US households have a pet, only a fraction of those animals are adopted from animal shelters. This new course looks at barriers that typically push potential adopters away from animal shelters and towards other options. In addition to examining adoption barriers and the misconceptions that help them persist, you’ll look at strategies that can lower these hurdles, help more animals reach a live outcome and a happy life, and help your shelter embrace and welcome all members of your community.
The webinar recording has been pre-approved for 1.0 Certified Animal Welfare Administrator continuing education credits by The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement and by the National Animal Care & Control Association. The self-paced course has been approved for 1.0 Certified Animal Welfare Administrator (CAWA) continuing education credits by The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement and by National Animal Care and Control Association and for 1 hour of continuing education credit until November 7, 2024 in jurisdictions that recognize RACE approval.
Learn more about the Maddie’s®️ Million Pet Challenge Learniverse, an interactive, online learning community found at the intersection of Knowing and Doing. Hosted by a team of animal welfare’s leading experts, it is a space to question, test, and implement innovations in the pursuit of continuous discovery and improvement in animal sheltering. #ThankstoMaddie, The Power of Yes! and other SPOT mods, along with cohort-style, coach-led Bootcamps, are available at no cost.
