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No More Homeless Pets Forum
March 31, 2003 Community Involvement |
How can we get our community involved in helping animals? Dennis Stearns of Leadership Greensboro and vice president of No More Homeless Pets in Guilford County, North Carolina, will share his insights into how you can be a more effective leader and get more people involved helping animals in your community.
Introduction from Dennis Stearns:
Leadership Greensboro is a Chamber of Commerce organization that fosters leadership development and tackles difficult community challenges. Along with other long-time animal lovers who are part of Leadership Greensboro, I helped develop one of the early No More Homeless Pets alliance groups: No More Homeless Pets in Guilford County. We traveled to a number of national conferences and I spent two years studying over 200 rescue, shelter and animal welfare groups around the country to create the NMHP – Guilford (now NMHP-Triad Alliance) 5-year business plan, using the best practices of many of these groups. The NMHP in Utah leadership team and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary helped provide information and morale support for our North Carolina effort.Our plan focuses on low-income spay/neuter, enhanced adoptions and humane education at elementary schools and local YMCAs. The last Super Adoption event featured over 25 animal rescue and welfare groups from 5 different counties. The NMHP-Triad Alliance also has over 50 community organizations supporting them in various ways.
The challenges we faced included early resistance from larger animal groups who were concerned about losing public support for their own mission; disagreements between competing groups over the plan focus; resistance from community leaders who view animal issues as taking a backseat to child or human concerns; and loss of key team leaders to relocation or family difficulties. We also encountered fundraising challenges (especially with the economic downturn) and challenges meeting our objective to assist Alliance members with fundraising, rather than to compete with them -- along with the difficulties of fostering good relations between diverse animal welfare groups and the vet community.
In spite of these challenges, we're still moving ahead for the animals.
I'll be happy to share our experiences to answer questions about how you can get your community more involved.
Questions
Making animal issues a priority in the community
Block by block program
Getting donors and volunteers to participate in our cause
Getting groups to buy in to the coalition idea
Handling partners that are falling short of standards
Partnering with the Symphony
Raising funds without competing with coalition partners
Providing opportunities for all coalition partners
Developing a business plan
How to make initial contact with community groups
E-mail networks for pet adoption
Organizing opportunities for Rescue Partners
Requirements for being an Alliance Partner
Making animal issues a priority in the community?
Question from a member:
How did you get the non-animal groups on board to realize that animal issues are an important part of the community? We have not had much luck in getting community leaders to want to partner with us. Specifically, we are trying to do a low-cost spay/neuter program targeted to lower income areas and thought for sure that the social service agencies would help us promote this to their clients and block watches and mobile meals would hand out flyers, but they have not shown any interest.Response from Dennis:
Our affiliation with Leadership Greensboro (LG) helped since the organization has great credibility throughout the community, with over 800 members in every walk of life and economic circumstance. While you may not have a similar leadership group locally (check with your local chamber of commerce or go to www.pointsoflight.org), you may be able to convince other groups that have already established great reputations to help champion the cause. It usually starts with one person, someone with power and influence in the community who you convince to get on your bandwagon. Recently, we couldn't get a particular well-respected person to back our program in addition to other causes that he had been involved with for years. We needed his support so our issues would get fair hearings whenever they came before governmental bodies. We learned that his wife is an animal lover, recruited her into the movement and helped educate her on the issues and, suddenly, he has a much better attitude about animal issues versus his other "pet" projects. Careful cultivation of centers of influence may take months or even years, but the long-term impact can be powerful.It is more challenging today due to the tough budget issues that non-profits are facing - child abuse groups, for example, get more attention from civic leaders when times are tough, than animal groups. But, what if you could re-frame the discussion from "child issues versus animal issues" into how children who learn to treat animals well will be better citizens in the future? Or, if they treat animals poorly, the research is clear that there is a much higher chance they will spin in a negative direction, possibly even into criminal behavior as teenagers or adults. This is part of our "Hearts and Minds" strategy.
Our NMHP program partially grew out of a post - Columbine massacre task force (along with rescue groups looking at pet overpopulation solutions), and this helped with the child-animal connection. When we did our original focus groups, we found that nine times as many citizens were concerned about animal cruelty as they were about pet overpopulation. We have elements of both areas in our NMHP program, so we shifted our focus in certain marketing areas to helping end animal cruelty. It attracts people to the cause who wouldn't have been as motivated if it were solely focused on pet overpopulation. Yet these folks were big contributors to our low-income spay/ neuter project. We call this the "Widening the Net strategy".
Block by block program
Question from Julie:
Can you tell us more about how your neighborhood approach is managed? I'm particularly interested in learning about training or guidelines that might be provided to your neighborhood block leaders.Response from Dennis:
We call this program, "Neighborhood by Neighborhood, Block by Block", or NXN for short. We have had to modify our neighborhood plan due to resource problems with several of our community and rescue partners. The basic approach is simple - offer every pet owner in a community (all of our Stage 1 neighborhoods are low income) to have their pets fixed for free with minimal hassles and assistance with transportation if needed. Our Plan B is a rotating shuttle so that cats and dogs are transported on Saturday morning to a high volume spay/neuter facility (some vets may participate also) and the pets are returned to their owners later that same day unless complications have arisen. So, block leaders just have to make sure that a) everyone is aware of the program and encouraged to participate and b) that appointments are made with at least two reminders, one the day before and one the morning of the transport. Eventually, block leaders will also be trained on how to deal with animal abuse issues when other (existing) resources are not immediately available; educating kids on approaching a strange animal; getting kids involved in positive humane efforts; and other items to deal with animal wellness issues, along with public safety concerns.Getting donors and volunteers to participate in our cause
Question from Kathi:
I volunteer for a spay/neuter group that provides low-cost certificates to low income pet owners. We are operating "word of mouth" and are hesitant to publicize our program, because we have found that publicity only seems to attract the people who need the certificates...not potential donors or volunteers. We subsidize the cost of surgeries through donations, so we cannot afford to be deluged with requests for certificates unless the funding is in place.How do we target volunteers and donors in a way that makes them want to jump in and help? We don't have any homeless animals for them to play with or walk. In fact, that is the point of it all. We don't want there to be any homeless animals for them to play with or walk. We don't want to depress people with the facts but being upbeat doesn't seem to work either. We tell people what kind of progress we've made, and they seem to think we don't need them. They profess to love animals and to be horrified about the population control killing, but not enough to get involved. How do we inspire people to get involved and help?
Response from Dennis:
We have struggled with this question from the beginning of our NMHP program. Budget cuts in our state (probably the same as in your area) have made city or county funding tough, but we are still pursuing these possibilities as we develop more centers of influence in the community who are sympathetic to our mission. As Harvey McKay says in his book, Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty, your best chance of success lies in building a network of champions who get things done and know other people who get things done.Our early focus groups determined that nine times more citizens were concerned about animal cruelty than pet overpopulation, so our marketing focuses now in this area with certain community groups. They get involved with the overall program because of the child-animal connection and then often get energized about pet overpopulation and donate to the low-income spay/neuter program.
We recently did a raffle (where names and addresses were also collected) with some great prizes donated from different businesses. Every single dollar went to low-income spay/neuter. But the marketing focused on homeless pets and the child-animal connection, with over 40 rescue groups and community groups selling our tickets. Most people said they participated first because of the great prizes but also because they liked the cause. We've added these people to our mailing list - some who are now better educated on why they should care will become NMHP members and donate to our programs. Some may just participate in the next raffle, but at least the seed has been planted about spay/neuter.
Nothing sells like the cute, innocent face of a kitten or puppy. We believe in using 9/10ths positive messages and only occasionally bringing out the abused or euthanized animal pictures. If you can make it personal with live animals, do whatever it takes (tasteful, please!) to get people motivated. We also use our puppeteers from our school puppet shows to "talk about spay/neuter" at community events. Adults love to listen to a cat and dog discuss the issue with humor and be kids again particularly with all the concerns of the world right now. Our task force learned a wealth of ideas from books, websites, regional No-Kill, ASPCA, HSUS and NMHP regional conferences. We also observed what worked for other causes (breast cancer, child abuse, the arts and a host of other worthy causes) and adapted their ideas to our movement.
Getting groups to buy-in to the coalition idea
Question from a member:
A small, core group of us have been meeting to start a No More Homeless Pets Coalition and we want to invite all of the local animal groups and community leaders to a meeting to get involved. We are nervous about it appearing that we are just another competing group when we want to be an umbrella for all groups. How did you invite all the groups to be partners in your efforts and allow them to have input but also not lose sight of the goals and focus you had determined were important from researching successful coalitions around the country?Response from Dennis:
Our connection to Leadership Greensboro (LG) helped with this since many of the groups knew that LG has a great reputation for getting things done and sticking to a project even if the going gets tough. See if you have a leadership group (and find the animal lovers in it) in your area by contacting your chamber of commerce or going to www.pointsoflight.org. But our alliance building hasn't been easy. Some groups were big supporters from day one. Others were concerned that we would dilute their brand name recognition by being part of the alliance, and possibly lose fundraising. In other non-profit areas, this is known as the "Abundance vs. Fortress" mentality. If you believe that NMHP will take a dollar from a donor that could have gone to you, that is the fortress mentality. If you believe that working together can increase the pie for everyone, particularly when potential and existing donors begin to really believe that the problem can be fixed by working together, that is the abundance mentality. Our travels around the country have taught us that most leaders in the animal community are caring, compassionate people, but many have unfortunately developed the fortress approach. Check out www.communityleadership.org for great resources on a concept called servant leadership, a powerful approach to leadership that can help move people from the fortress to the abundance mindset.We have tried to be helpmates to our 27 NMHP Alliance members whenever and wherever possible, helping them with foster home referrals, selling tickets to their own fundraisers, running interference on governmental matters, running articles on them in our own local Companion publication, connecting them to people who can help them solve their own problems and a host of other ways that we say "we love you and we want this to be a win-win".
One of our marketing taglines is "Working together, we can make a difference". Working is the key word, rather than talking. Some (fortunately a minority!) of our alliance members would occasionally scratch each other or lift a leg if we had them in the same room. Instead, they may be together at an event where everyone is focused on the animals and actually call a truce and help each other. We had this happen at a NMHP Super Adoption event where two groups that don't get along helped each other after two foster dogs got into a fight. Peter Marsh (STOP in New Hampshire and an online contributor to Best Friends) was a great early influence on our program by convincing us that the alliance members don't have to all love each other and sing songs together around the campfire. Focusing on a common vision for the animals and working towards the common goal will slowly but surely mend fences and break down barriers to communication.
Handling partners that are falling short of standards
Question from a member:
The last of your key steps is to "Be Positive". I agree that this is important, but also know that there can be times when it is right to speak up, even when its unpleasant. For example, how would No More Homeless Pets in Guilford County handle an affiliate that is routinely falling substantially short in important areas, such as standards of care for fostered animals? Are there proactive 'best practice' guidelines? A committee to address such issues?Response from Dennis:
We do our best to not be put in the position of being the United Nations "police force". We are also still in the relatively early, "messy" stage of our NMHP program and don't feel it is appropriate to get tough with Affiliate partners who don't meet our or other's standards. With that said, we have eliminated classified ads from our Companion publication that we thought were disguised puppy mills; have excluded groups from Super Adoption events if we have multiple complaints from Affiliates and some degree of evidence (since some groups don't play nice with others and may be spinning a story just to, in their mind, raise their profile and lower the competition's respectability); and have made some tough decisions based on behavior that we felt was inappropriate or counter to our mission.We have done some best practices sharing and some groups gobble the info up and implement ideas immediately while others have a "not invented here" attitude. Leadership Greensboro and our NMHP program were founded on the belief that great things can be accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit and if you don't sweat the small, petty stuff. We had a situation where one group didn't like an idea from Mike Arms (www.animalcenter.org) that was brought back from a NMHP Regional Conference, but another group used it successfully and now the other group thinks it is the cat's meow. Go figure! We believe that, over time, standards will likely be better with all the groups, simply because every single one of our NMHP Alliance members truly care about the animals that have been entrusted to their care.
Partnering with the Symphony
Question from a member:
Could you explain how your partnership with the Symphony works in terms of how you got them to partner with you and what the partnership involves regarding promoting homeless pets?Response from Dennis:
The Symphony partnership came about as a result of the Leadership Greensboro connection - it also helped that the Executive Director loves animals! They were part of early brainstorming on how to get our message out to a broader audience of children and to adults who might not normally get exposed to our messages through other channels. Their willingness and desire to go even further and create a Year of the Pet program and design pet-themed symphony programs was great! Their youth director actually did a number of live musical pieces for our annual dinner and many of their members have now become volunteers. It is primarily still a part of our awareness strategy, but we have felt the benefits in a number of our other programs.We often have puppeteers with Shep the Wonder Dog (star of our puppet shows for kids), Precious the Precocious Pussycat, and their animal friends in the lobby greeting Symphony patrons. The love and passion people have for animals comes out as patrons pass by our puppets. Even if someone was having a bad day when they came in, they can't help but smile, relax and get in a better mood, which helps them enjoy the Symphony performance. We have also actively supported Symphony programs and helped get them publicity, so trying to create a win-win is always the best partnership. I've also been told by many in their leadership that helping a program with such warm, fuzzy goals that touch every area of the community (including children through the Humane Ed programs) is just good business!
Raising funds without competing with coalition partners
Question from a member:
How do you handle raising funds and deciding how that money will be spent? Do all of the funds go towards shared programs such as spay/neuter and adoption events or do your give your partners a portion of funds raised? Have you been successful in getting any of your non-animal partners to provide any funding?Response from Dennis:
This has been a tough time for fundraising, as it has been for many non-profit organizations. Our fundraising has attempted to avoid conflicts with our NMHP Alliance members, which hasn't been easy, as they have really increased their activity in the last several years! We have shared great ideas from Mike Arms, Ed Boks, Peter Marsh and many other fundraising experts who speak at NMHP Regional meetings. In several cases, our local partners asked if we minded if they implemented the idea instead of us, and we have always said "yes", as long as they did it with as much passion as Mike Arms (!). Every dollar they raise will ultimately help us achieve our common goals. We have helped some of our partners sell tickets to their fundraising events, provided free advertising in our Companion distribution racks, handed out their event literature at NMHP programs, and provided entertainment for free at their events (our puppeteers are always a huge hit!).Our focus is on sponsorships for Super Adoption events and advertisers for Companion magazine. Free publicity access to these high community-profile tools is available to all partners. We have even featured special articles by local vets. We focus on what will have the most impact in adoptions, spay/neuter, humane education and animal wellness areas. Any excess money from these programs, membership donations, raffles, etc., is now focused on our low income spay/neuter programs, which to us is focusing the water from the fire hose at the base of the fire. We have also helped several groups get grants, which we expect will be an increasing priority in coming years.
Providing opportunities for all coalition partners
Question from a member:
With 27 NMHP Alliance members, how do you provide equal opportunities for all of them? For instance, our coalition wants to do a foster drive for the local shelters, but there are so many of them, we don't know how to promote them all. We would like to concentrate our efforts to help animal control since they are an open admission shelter, but we don't want to alienate the other participants in our coalition.Response from Dennis:
We try to give equal access to all our Alliance members, some of which are more focused on spay/neuter and some of which are more dedicated to adoptions. Our Super Adoption events and Companion magazine certainly level the playing field for large versus small organizations. At our last SA event, several smaller groups pulled out all the stops in marketing and public relations and adopted significantly more animals than their much larger counterparts.Most of our Alliance members are very understanding of the fact that most of the NMHP team leaders and volunteers have day jobs and can't be everywhere and do everything all the time. We have tried to stay focused on what benefits the animals the most and devote more resources to those areas as they are available. We also have designated "diplomats" who deal with any conflicts that arise and have a background and attitude that helps iron out most problems. As we did our early research to launch our NMHP program, the leaders in this movement that we met and talked to made it clear that coalition problems will always occur, but if you set the right expectation up front, deal with problems using the Golden Rule, make sure that your best diplomats are handling the inevitable conflicts and focus on the animal's needs through more action and less coalition meetings, you will make progress towards your goals.
Developing a business plan
Question from a member:
On your website, it mentions that you have a five-year plan to achieve no more homeless pets by 2005 and it seems that the focus is on spay/neuter, adoptions, and education. We would like to do something similar, but don't have anyone well versed in writing a business plan. Could you briefly explain how you set your adoption and spay/neuter goals (and what they are) and if you are on target for 2005?Response from Dennis:
We originally set our spay/neuter goals based on healthy animals killed per 1000 population using statistics from several No-Kill programs and NMHP conferences. The good news is that our local infrastructure is now significantly enhanced with a high-volume spay/neuter clinic run by one group on one side of the county and another run by a different group on the other side (that group is doing a major expansion this year)--which is great for low-income pet owners and others who might not get to a fixed facility otherwise and can't afford a visit to a vet. It will also help our neighborhood plan as soon as our community partners can get their logistics set up to assist in group transport of low-income pets to s/n facilities.The challenging part is that we have now expanded our mission to include more counties and so it appears that 2005 will not be the goal for the expanded area. However, some of our team leaders have been very impressed with Nathan Winograd's "just do it" approach and some discussions are going on about what would have to happen to step up the timetable for an expanded area. Check out Nathan's comments on the forum earlier this year. To further complicate the planning process, we have had a number of mass rescues from outside our area that have, according to some of our Alliance partners, made it tougher for our original county program to meet the 2005 deadline. Several alliance members have run into roadblocks that have delayed implementation of key plan elements like expansion of foster homes, an important part of our original five year plan, and a cornerstone of Nathan's accelerated plan.
Good Business Plans are meant to be living, breathing entities with constant evaluation and adjustments. A number of our leadership have experience in this area - there are lots of good books at the library on the subject and some for non-profits are available at www.pointsoflight.org (look for local training on this site also) or www.communityleadership.org. It would be great if you could recruit someone with experience in this area. The good news is that most of the key plan ingredients are not trade secrets and are readily available. Go back and look at all the prior guests on this forum--many of them were the inspiration for various parts of our plan! We invented very little, although we did innovate in a few areas, like our school/ YMCA puppet shows.
We recently did a "celebrity" puppet show for the employees of a company where several of the executives had puppet roles. This company had been a tough nut to crack due to their other non-profit priorities, but now they encourage donations and volunteering for NMHP. Shep the Wonder Dog (our lead puppet character) did more to develop this relationship than half a dozen Leadership Greensboro members who had been approaching them for a year! Way to go Shep!! What has impressed me, meeting many of the wonderful animal groups around the country at conferences, is that they are masters of innovation since they have often had to do more with less. I sometimes come back from a NMHP Regional Conference even more juiced from these bits of sharing than the expert speakers!
On balance, we think progress has been made on lots of fronts in our local NMHP plan, but not as much as many of us would like. On the other hand, an article in our Companion magazine about protecting your pets during the winter made the rounds at many Neighborhood Community watch meetings and was read aloud by NMHP members at some. We understand that this saved the life of at least two dogs (that we know of). Progress of the plan isn't always measured just in broad strokes, but sometimes in the good we can do for one animal at a time.
How to make initial contact with community groups
Question from a member:
How would you suggest reaching out to community groups, such as the fire and police departments, leadership groups, symphony, etc., if you don't have any contacts with them and they have been traditionally non-animal oriented? Do you think a cold call would work and how do you suggest setting up the initial meeting as to what to say and who to speak with?Response from Dennis:
Cold calls sometimes work (we still do them occasionally), but we prefer warm or hot calls! If you work on the premise that getting a toehold with a prominent or well-respected community leader will then get you introductions to other leaders, you will get further and faster than cold calling. Animal lovers are everywhere - Chamber and Leadership programs usually have big rolodexes. So, that is a good place to start trying to find the center of influence you need to get the ball rolling.Democratic political leaders are sometimes more sympathetic to our cause, but we have several Republican politicians who have publicly endorsed us (non-partisan support is usually best so the movement doesn't become a political hot potato!) and one Republican who has actually been a puppeteer for NMHP at celebrity puppet shows. For someone who doesn't believe in the animal abuse/ teenage delinquency/adult criminal behavior ties (research is clear, but some people just don't get it), another great tool to gain support is the research championed by people like Peter Marsh and Ed Boks on savings to the city/county of $2.50 (some estimates are much higher) for every $1 spent on spay/neuter. In these days of budget woes, as crass as it feels, some people may get motivated more by potential budget savings than all the other wonderful benefits of a successful NMHP effort.
So you have to find people who will champion your cause who are respected in the community. This elevates the cause to a higher plain, which is critical given all the other good, worthy causes clamoring for attention in the public eye. You may have to turn over lots of rocks and it is a constant process. We lost two key team leaders (who had great community contacts), one to a job move and another to illness, and we are still struggling to find a replacement who will do the job at a top notch level. We have NMHP diplomats working to create NMHP ambassadors every week. We want a large army that can't be ignored when it comes to having an effective voice for the animals.
Email networks for pet adoption
Question from a Member:
In a recent article I read that you broke down the county into communities and neighborhoods with coordinators and that you were trying to create an email list of 100,000 to do "Pet of the Week" promotions by email. What criteria did you use to divide up the neighborhoods and have you found that the email list is working?Response from Dennis:
This has not worked out as we had hoped, although we are doing a "guerilla marketing" version of the idea. It still has merit given the increasingly wired world we live in and we have actually created an e-mail network that has helped get a number of pets adopted, just not at the scale we originally targeted. We are doing a lot of "Pass it on" advisories (which is what a lot of groups we talked to around the country are doing) so we can take advantage of the fact that one person often has 100 people in their network. If we send a message to 400 members and network affiliates, and they pass it on to 100 people they each know, we just touched 40,000 people with the message. Many will be duplicates and you can take this concept to the point of being silly, but the idea does create adoption activity. The branching of the tree can get pretty impressive if you have a cute or compelling story that people really want to pass along to their friends.The problems with the broader concept stem from three areas. First, people have been changing e-mail carriers a lot lately and maintaining the list to stay current is really a pain in the rear end. Some industry technology experts say this will calm down in the future - time will tell. The second problem is that many people have slower computers that can't handle .jpg picture files, much less streaming video. This is changing rapidly and we guess won't even be much of an issue three years from now.
The big problem is privacy. With the new Patriot Act, intrusive government agencies have got a lot of citizens up in arms about what needs to be done to combat terrorism. One of our NMHP board members is in the middle of this issue on a Human Rights Commission. In the past, most community and neighborhood groups didn't want to give out their e-mails to just anyone for fear of spam (e-mail ads) - now many are fearful that they will get on "Big Brother's" list. Our Washington, D.C. contacts tell us that the U.S. government's technology is sophisticated enough that they can monitor key phrases and discussions anyway over the internet, so sharing e-mail addresses with us shouldn't be an issue. However, it is (reality and perception of reality often diverge!), and we fight enough battles daily on behalf of the animals that we've decided this is one where we won't waste our energy paddling up stream.
Stay tuned though, because leveraging a network through e-mail still has lots of merit and will likely be an even better idea in the future, perhaps just done a little differently than our original idea.
Organizing opportunities for Rescue Partners
Question from a member:
My question is about leadership: how much NMHP organizes for the partners, vs. how much do you try to get them to do for themselves? For instance, if you decide to do a super adoption event, is NMHP the one who gets a venue, sponsors, calls all the partners, etc., or do you try to get a partner to take on the task of organizing one and then NMHP lends support?Response from Dennis:
We take the lead role for organizational detail in Super Adoption and Companion matters, although our partners provide a lot of input on marketing ideas, article content, etc. Pretty much all the groups have to do for Super Adoption events is show up, be polite and helpful to the public, and make sure their area is kept under control. (One of our business partners is a company that cleans up the poop areas, so the groups don't need to worry about this.) We are getting some of them to help pass out poster cards and lawn signs. Some groups help pass out Companion magazines and widen the scope of our education efforts. Other areas are more partner intensive, like low-income spay/neuter, but even then we try to design plans that aren't too complicated and stay within the normal operational priorities of the partners. Most of our partners are operating close to the anxiety edge most of the time, and the last thing we want to do is make their lives more complicated!We are also focusing more on low-income spay/neuter, instead of plowing resources into Super Adoption events, expanded magazine distribution, and other areas, and all of our partners are very supportive of this. To some extent, our base programs are very adoption intensive (Companion magazine, arguably, is accomplishing a lot at many different levels beyond the free adoption-advertising provided to our partners). We need to expand low-income s/n faster than other areas just to stay balanced in the future. With that said, at a recent Alliance meeting, several people asked if we would consider doing quarterly Super Adoption events so they could cut down on adoption fairs. After we picked our SA Team Leader off the floor and gave her tranquillizers, we had a good discussion of the intensity of these SA events and how that could de-focus our limited resources away from low-income spay/neuter and several other areas. There is a lot to be done at so many levels, but we don't want to lose track of the prime objective. We want to do a lot more in feral cat areas, including public education (another plus for having our own publication!), but may have to wait until 2004 to really crank that area up.
I personally want to do more in the puppeteering areas and really expand the children's education area since I believe that the peer pressure at the child level plus the influence these kids can have on their parents' behavior can help accelerate animal wellness goals that go beyond our core mission. This is more of a "plant seeds for the future" program versus "solve the near-term problem". We don't have the money or people resources to do this at the level I would like, but I know what our first priority is and support the current plan balance (which includes some focus in this education area) 100%. We have already researched alternatives and even set up the template to ramp these efforts up, but only after we have other areas well under control should we tackle this more intensively. Now, if we got a $100,000 grant next week…..;-)
We had a plan to start working with our contacts in the state capital to get new animal cruelty legislation introduced in 2004. A high profile cruelty case happened in a neighboring county that made this front burner; we have now been advised by our contacts that 2003 is not a good time to do this, but several of our folks are continuing to explore the issue. Here is where the experience of the previous forum guests is critical: several of them have described at past NMHP regional meetings how they combine campaigns for new legislation with requests for public money for low-income spay/neuter and other initiatives. Given the current budget woes, we have been told this combination approach would likely fail, but is it better to get legislation passed sooner but give up the public relations bonanza that might provide money--along with the new law to help in ending pet overpopulation? I'm not smart enough to know the answer to the question, but people in our extended Alliance group (through Leadership Greensboro and Leadership North Carolina, as well as others) do know how to analyze these issues. Again, this highlights the importance of having an extensive network to think through the options and not just charge down a path because it appears on the surface to be the right answer.
Requirements for being an Alliance Partner
Question from a member:
In order for organizations to be part of your Alliance are there any requirements? Do they sign an agreement or promise to do certain things or is it a loose association where they participate as they can?Response from Dennis:
Right now it is a loose affiliation with no agreements to sign other than
agreeing to abide by rules for our Super Adoption events, Companion magazine,
and other project initiatives. Some partners participate in all our activities
while others don't or can't. Certain projects between us and a given group
(for example, in the low-income spay/neuter area) require a bit more documentation,
but we try to keep it simple and not get as wound up on technicalities as
our lawyer sometimes wants! Our philosophy is to trust someone until they
give us reason not to trust them. Most partners have high ethics and integrity.
Some are a bit more marginal on ethics with human-to-human contact but still
consistently do the right thing for the animals, so we find ourselves bending
a bit at times.
We do have a number of 2004/05 projects that may require more formal agreements
between subsets of our alliance members. (Again, I suspect that our leadership
will decide to err on the side of trust rather than paranoia.) We have found
in our travels that there is far too much distrust and suspicion of motives
already between animal groups around the country (sometimes even within the
groups themselves!). More often than not, one side or the other just had a
miscommunication that blew up into something more than it should have been.
We mediated a nasty dispute between two groups (outside this area) that boiled
down to two board members from each group misunderstanding comments that had
been made by some of their members! How tragic that so much emotional time
and energy went into this which could have been directed into more positive
areas. They have now "made up" and are working to rebuild bridges
by working on small projects together. If the majority of groups everywhere
just relaxed and explored ways to work together (and didn't sweat it if small
friction developed as a result), how many more animals would both survive
and prosper as a result?
