The Best Friends Podcast

This week we’re sharing the interview we did with one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Best Friends National Conference, Scott Stratten. Scott is a prolific author and speaker. As the founder of UnMarketing, he’s helped millions understand how to create community and connection through their marketing efforts in the digital age. We talk about UnMarketing, building relationships with the publ...

Love or hate it; politics is a part of our work in animal welfare. Laws, ordinances, and regulations - or the lack of them - can impact our ability to save lives positively and negatively. For example, some communities have laws that consider feral cats to be abandoned. That means a TNVR program (trap-neuter-vaccinate-return) may mean you run afoul of that law anytime you take the last step of tha...

Since 2017, the partnership between The Rachael Ray Foundation and Best Friends has supported Best Friends Network Partners through millions of dollars in grants to help reduce shelter deaths in communities across the country. The funded projects over the years have varied. Some focused on increasing lifesaving within one shelter. Others used the grant to fund programs to help other communities be...

This week registration opened for the Return to Home Challenge. During October, participating organizations that handle lost/stray dogs and cats will take their efforts to get lost pets back home to the next level. Using simple practices such as microchipping, making information on lost pets easily accessible by the public, and educating the community's pet owners on what to do to ensure their pet...

During this year's Best Friends National Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, we interviewed several industry leaders for the podcast. This week we're sharing our conversation with Alexis Pugh, the director of Memphis Animal Services. We talk about the state of animal welfare in Southwest Tennessee during this challenging time in the industry and what they're doing to meet the needs of peop...

The Best Friends 2021 Lifesaving Dataset showed that over the last year, adoptions did not keep pace with the increase in the number of cats and dogs entering shelters. Unfortunately, that trend has continued into 2022, and with many around the country experiencing the same issues, transports are happening less frequently, adding to the strain on animal shelters. We wanted to learn more about the...

It's the return of the Best Friends National Conference! Animal welfare professionals from across the country (and beyond!) have made their way to Raleigh, North Carolina, for our first in-person conference since the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 event. This year we're in Raleigh, North Carolina. Like the previous host communities, such as Atlanta, Dallas, Atlantic City, and North C...

As we begin the final preparations for the 2022 Best Friends National Conference happening next week, we sit down with one of this year’s speakers, the director of lifesaving centers for the east region, Fraily Rodriguez.  Fraily started in animal welfare with the Pet Alliance of Greater Orlando in 2006. Over the next 15 years, he did just about everything there is to do in this field, becomi...

The Best Friends National Adoption Weekend is coming up July 22nd-24th. This network partner exclusive event helps organizations like yours adopt more animals. To learn more about the event and to register, check out this link:  https://network.bestfriends.org/join-us/events/best-friends-national-adoption-event To get us all geared up for the adoption event, we're dipping into the archives to...

The animal welfare field is full of incredible people doing extraordinary things to save lives. This week we chatted with one of them, the regional strategist for the south-central region at Best Friends, Dr. Louiza Chan. In her role at Best Friends, Louiza consults with organizations across several states to help them save more lives. She’s a veterinarian, she’s from Australia, and she is a facul...

When saving shelter pets' lives, you can't know what's working or not if you're not tracking your efforts. So in 2016, Best Friends began an ambitious project to create the most comprehensive and accurate dataset tracking the lifesaving efforts happening in shelters across America. Since we began collecting the data in 2016, the number of animals unnecessarily losing their lives in shelters has st...

As we talked about in last week’s episode, many communities across the country are struggling as they try to deal with crisis levels of shelter capacity. More pets than usual are coming in, and while adoptions are up in many places, they’re just not keeping the pace with the rising intake levels. Successful communities know that they need the community to help them save lives, so they are transpar...

Many animal shelters across the country are struggling right now. In most areas, intake is up, and positive outcomes are down. With other factors impacting our industry, such as staffing issues and the economy, what is happening is nothing short of a crisis. If you are experiencing this, you know that it can be hard to maintain lifesaving when the number of animals coming in doesn’t slow down. Cre...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected our lives in many ways, and it seems to have transformed the American workforce. Last year the experts dubbed the shifting economy “the great resignation” as millions of workers left the workforce during the pandemic. Now, thanks to more data, the experts say this period has become “the great reshuffle.” Millions of workers are still leaving their jobs...

This week we're talking about an important but often underutilized and sometimes dysfunctional component of every nonprofit organization - the board of directors. Boards can take on different forms, but all boards of directors provide a governance role. Sometimes (most often in the case of small organizations), the board can be a "working board," where members take on operational responsibilities...

The pandemic stopped many things in our personal and professional lives, including animal welfare conferences. We were lucky to have virtual options to help tide us over, but there's something different about being together in person. So with in-person travel and meetings starting to come back, there's a good chance you will be attending a conference this year. As it's been a while, you may be fee...

Helping people and pets in rural America comes with many challenges. For example, how do you offer even the most basic veterinary services when there are no vets who can help within 100 miles, and buying a transport van is a pipe dream? How do you recruit new foster homes when you've already asked everyone in town? Reassigning staff to support new programs can be a valuable strategy, but how can y...

Most estimates say that the number of lost pets each year is roughly 10 million. One in every three pets will be lost at some point. These staggering statistics are more than just numbers on a page - each one is a pet with a loving family desperate to find them and bring them home safely. Unfortunately, the number of lost pets in shelters which make it home is very low. The number of lost dogs get...

Last week we heard all about the Best Friends shelter collaborative program. This peer-based mentorship model pairs up shelters with a track record of lifesaving success with shelters in need of the expertise and support a knowledgeable mentor can offer. Best Friends is planning to grow the shelter collaborative program this year, but you don’t need to be officially part of this program to pair up...

Collaboration comes in many forms. Maybe the most common type of collaboration in our work is through a coalition—an often large group comprised of stakeholders teaming up to achieve a broader, shared goal of community-wide success. Another approach to working together is the Best Friends shelter collaborative program, where strategic matches are made between two organizations. One shelter that ha...

It’s not easy to take risks, especially if you’re someone who prefers the familiar. But believing that change isn’t necessary because “this is how we’ve always done it” can be detrimental to your lifesaving efforts. Our field is constantly evolving, and to save as many lives as possible, we have to be willing to try new approaches, even when that means going beyond our comfort zone. This week we’r...

Community-supported sheltering is being talked about a lot right now, but it’s not a fad. Instead, it’s a natural shift in modern sheltering, as we go beyond the walls of our organizations and engage the myriad stakeholders to help us save more lives. When the shelter, field services, government, rescue organizations, the public, social service organizations, and others come together to save lives...

This week is part two from our conversation with Julie Castle, the CEO of Best Friends (if you missed part one that focused on pay inequality, check that out here: https://network.bestfriends.org/proven-strategies/best-friends-podcast/best-friends-podcast-ep-100 ). This part of the interview seemed to be especially fitting this week, given the events in animal welfare and the world-at-large, as Ju...

This week we're dipping into the archives to revisit one of our earliest episodes, and one that is also one of the most downloaded ever. So if you caught this the first time or not, we encourage you to give this one a listen. It was June of 2020, and the nation was gripped by racial tension and division exacerbated by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man in Minneapolis. Day...

It's episode number 100 of The Best Friends Podcast, and we are thrilled to welcome back Julie Castle, the CEO of Best Friends Animal Society. Our conversation for this episode focused on a new compensation program rolled out at Best Friends, which raises the pay ranges for hourly animal caregiving staff and veterinary technicians. Julie talks about something she calls the "poverty headspace" and...