Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Co-hosts:
Rachel Lim, Marketing Communications Specialist, Maddie's Fund
Dr Sara Pizano, founder of Team Shelter USA, a national, full-service animal welfare consulting firm that helps funders, organizations and municipal leaders learn and use proven best practices for animal well-being. She is also a consultant with Maddie’s Pet Million Challenge, a cohort dedicated to helping communities build programs to keep families and their pets together. Dr Pizano is the author of The Best Practice Playbook for Animal Shelters and the new Go-To Guide for Animal Services.
Guest speaker: BJ Adkins, founder of The Animal-Angels Foundation that serves 7 counties in Central Alabama. She is the author of The Shift to Prevention, a practical guide with tools you need to implement prevention-first animal welfare in your community. animal-angelsfoundation.org/index.html
As a foster parent for a local shelter, BJ started to learn about the animal welfare system and saw great opportunity to prevent issues with pet owners upstream. So she founded the Animal-Angels Foundation and recently published an amazing resource guide that helps right the system to focus on prevention instead of reaction. Join us for what will be a full-court press leaning into prevention and solutions on a very broad scale. BJ is also developing a free software that links all animal welfare organizations and pet owners to match needs with resources.
Audience: Adoptions and foster staff and volunteers, Return to home and intake prevention staff, Veterinary professionals (vets, techs, support staff), Behavior staff and volunteers, Field services/animal control officers, Grant writers/fundraisers, Marketing and communications staff.
Key Takeaways:
Most pet surrender begins before the shelter. Families are usually out of options, not out of love. The prevention work has to happen upstream of the surrender call, not after it.
Fragmented systems are the real bottleneck. Shelters, rescues, vets, landlords, and community orgs are all working the same families separately. A shared operational layer (like the Animal Welfare Resource Network (AWRN) animal-angelsfoundation.org/AWRN.html lets partners work the case together instead of duplicating each other or losing the family in the gap.
Prevention is measurable, fundable, and scalable. Every prevented intake costs a fraction of an absorbed one. Once you have the data, the story shifts from ""rescue heroes"" to ""system builders,"" and that opens up municipal, sponsor, and grant funding that traditional shelter messaging cannot.
To comment or ask more questions about this meeting, please visit https://maddies.fund/communityconversations6126
About Community Conversations, hosted by Maddie’s Fund: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, animal sheltering transformed overnight. Foster-based sheltering, home-based employees and volunteers, along with collaboration galvanized our communities. The pandemic, along with social injustice, has motivated our industry to look at how we partner with our communities and confront our own biases. Shelter and rescue staff across the country began talking on a weekly basis, offering support and innovative ideas to do things differently. To learn more about these calls, visit forum.maddiesfund.org/communityconversations
Co-hosts:
Rachel Lim, Marketing Communications Specialist, Maddie's Fund
Dr Sara Pizano, founder of Team Shelter USA, a national, full-service animal welfare consulting firm that helps funders, organizations and municipal leaders learn and use proven best practices for animal well-being. She is also a consultant with Maddie’s Pet Million Challenge, a cohort dedicated to helping communities build programs to keep families and their pets together. Dr Pizano is the author of The Best Practice Playbook for Animal Shelters and the new Go-To Guide for Animal Services.
Guest speaker: BJ Adkins, founder of The Animal-Angels Foundation that serves 7 counties in Central Alabama. She is the author of The Shift to Prevention, a practical guide with tools you need to implement prevention-first animal welfare in your community. animal-angelsfoundation.org/index.html
As a foster parent for a local shelter, BJ started to learn about the animal welfare system and saw great opportunity to prevent issues with pet owners upstream. So she founded the Animal-Angels Foundation and recently published an amazing resource guide that helps right the system to focus on prevention instead of reaction. Join us for what will be a full-court press leaning into prevention and solutions on a very broad scale. BJ is also developing a free software that links all animal welfare organizations and pet owners to match needs with resources.
Audience: Adoptions and foster staff and volunteers, Return to home and intake prevention staff, Veterinary professionals (vets, techs, support staff), Behavior staff and volunteers, Field services/animal control officers, Grant writers/fundraisers, Marketing and communications staff.
Key Takeaways:
Most pet surrender begins before the shelter. Families are usually out of options, not out of love. The prevention work has to happen upstream of the surrender call, not after it.
Fragmented systems are the real bottleneck. Shelters, rescues, vets, landlords, and community orgs are all working the same families separately. A shared operational layer (like the Animal Welfare Resource Network (AWRN) animal-angelsfoundation.org/AWRN.html lets partners work the case together instead of duplicating each other or losing the family in the gap.
Prevention is measurable, fundable, and scalable. Every prevented intake costs a fraction of an absorbed one. Once you have the data, the story shifts from ""rescue heroes"" to ""system builders,"" and that opens up municipal, sponsor, and grant funding that traditional shelter messaging cannot.
To comment or ask more questions about this meeting, please visit https://maddies.fund/communityconversations6126
About Community Conversations, hosted by Maddie’s Fund: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, animal sheltering transformed overnight. Foster-based sheltering, home-based employees and volunteers, along with collaboration galvanized our communities. The pandemic, along with social injustice, has motivated our industry to look at how we partner with our communities and confront our own biases. Shelter and rescue staff across the country began talking on a weekly basis, offering support and innovative ideas to do things differently. To learn more about these calls, visit forum.maddiesfund.org/communityconversations
