For Animal Organizations

Bonney Brown became the Executive Director of the Nevada Humane Society in February of 2007. Just eight short months later Bonney has increased the number of adoptions, decreased euthanasia, and vastly expanded the organizations' volunteer and foster family base. Bonney tells us how she did it in this candid interview.

Q. Bonney, you took over as Executive Director at the Nevada Humane Society (NHS) in Reno in February, 2007. What was the situation when you first arrived?

A. The facility was new, about a year old. It's a building we share with Washoe County Regional Animal Services. We have an agreement with the county – we take all the owner surrendered animals from county residents and animal services picks up strays.

Unfortunately, NHS hasn't had consistent leadership for several years. A long term Executive Director had left two years prior to my arrival, and three interim directors had come and gone during this time.

A shift in the Board of Directors had also taken place. Among the board changes was the addition of an active member of the local rescue community. This new board member discovered the writing of Nathan Winograd and passed it on to the NHS Board President. It really focused the board on saving lives. They hired Winograd's No-Kill Solutions to perform an organizational assessment and to do a nation-wide search for a new Executive Director.

Q. What was your first priority?

A. The first thing I focused on was changing the culture to make lifesaving the top priority; getting animals out alive and decreasing the number of animals coming in. All of our decisions come from and are guided by this lifesaving focus.

Q. What specifically did you work on at first?

A. Two things: implementing new procedures, policies and protocols, and building the right team. A commitment to no-kill requires people who share this ethic and will truly go the extra mile to save lives. Change is not easy and it was no exception here. Many employees left, others were let go, and some embraced the new focus and are still with us.

I'm a fan of the book "Good to Great", by Jim Collins. It talks about the importance of getting the right people on board. That's critical initial work, because when you have the right people, with shared ethics and clear goals, a lot of things start to fall into place. With the exception of one manager who is still here, we hired a new management team of people who have a commitment to lifesaving and experience with no-kill sheltering.

Q. What sorts of procedures, policies and protocols did you change?

A. We changed almost everything. We rewrote all of our job descriptions to put more emphasis on life-saving. For example, kennel attendants became animal caregivers, office assistants are now called adoption counselors. We changed adoption contracts and other documents to eliminate negative, punitive sounding language such as, "we don't adopt to people who..." We also changed our volunteer policies. Before, there had been a list of things volunteers couldn't or shouldn't do. Visitors and volunteers weren't allowed in cat rooms and potential adopters were not allowed to visit with a dog without a permission slip. Now volunteers and adopters are encouraged to interact with animals.

We also changed our euthanasia policy. Animals are euthanized when our vet tells us they have a poor prognosis for recovery with reasonable quality of life, but animals who are old, sick, homely, or shy are no longer routinely killed. Cats with ringworm, or respiratory infections and dogs with treatable behavioral issues, like food aggression, are treated and usually end up in great new homes.

We also made major improvements in customer service to encourage more adoptions.

• We extended our hours in the evenings. Staff now stays until adoptions are completed or until people are ready to leave, instead of closing right on the dot.

• We're open every holiday except two – we do a lot of adoptions on holidays because people are off work.

• We lowered adoption fees from $95 to $50 and gave a lot more leeway to managers to make special deals for special needs animals or to adopt two animals together.

• We worked on cleanliness, and implemented the 15 minute poop rule – staff and volunteers strive to clean up any mess within 15 minutes not only for the animals but to make the shelter a pleasant place for the public.

We hear from many visitors and volunteers how different the atmosphere in the shelter is now – it's our goal to create and maintain a friendly and pleasant environment.

Q. Did you add a lot of new programs?

Program development is an area we are still working on.

Initially we focused on pet adoptions. We now spay/neuter, vaccinate and microchip every animal before they are made available for adoption. This has streamlined the adoption process and eliminates a lot of headaches for adopters and for the staff.

We have a lot of adoption promotions in the shelter and daily offsite adoptions. After all, if we were selling cars or TV sets we would be promoting them aggressively to bring people in – and promotion is even more important to the animals whose lives depend upon us to find them great new homes.

To reduce the number of animals coming into the shelter we started a Help Desk for animal behavior problems, to assist people who are thinking about giving their pets up due to a life style change, or who have found a colony of feral cats. We are currently getting 300 calls and e-mails per week.

We just started a pit-bull spay/neuter program that offers a $5 rebate to people who will fix their pit bulls, and we already have a waiting list of 200 people. This program is very important because most of the dogs who are not saved are pits.

Because 40% of the cats killed are feral, we've started a barn cat program. (Community Cats, a local TNR program already offers free spay/neuter for ferals.) We're also talking with animal services about referring feral cat complaints to our Help Desk for mediation, rather than bringing them into the shelter.

Q. You mentioned that you share a facility with Washoe County Animal Services. What is your relationship like?

A. Our relationship with the county is very good. The county program is very well run and they are in sync with our goal of achieving a no-kill community. Their field officers work hard to reunite animals in the field so they don't have to bring them into the shelter. For example, all officers are equipped with scanners to look for microchips and cell phones to make calls while they're out on patrol. If they pick up a dog, they post notices in the neighborhood. They work with the local TNR group, Community Cats, to return ear-tipped cats to their colonies and allow the group to do feral surgeries in their clinic two days a week.

Here's a great example of how we work as a team: officers gave us a heads up recently when they picked up over forty orange cats who had been abandoned in carriers in a field. That gave us time to plan for and tell the public about the "Great Orange Cat Rescue" and to line up potential adopters before the cats even came to our shelter.

Q. Have you made significant inroads in achieving no-kill community status since you arrived?

A. From January, 2007 through August, 2007 our community euthanasia is down 54% for dogs and 41% for cats. Adoptions are up over 70% for dogs and 100% for cats over the same period in 2006. Our live release rate for the first eight months of 2007 is 91.8% for dogs and 72.8 % for cats.

I think one thing helping to drive our numbers is that we now set monthly adoption goals. For August, the goal was 800 and we exceeded it by three. Goals excite the staff, public, and volunteers.

Q. How has the community responded to your new emphasis on lifesaving?

A. The response has been overwhelming. We've gone from 25 to 900 volunteers and from 12 foster families to 220 foster families – without really trying! People are flocking to join our lifesaving mission. We have new volunteer dog walkers and cat socializers. There are teams who post animals on craigslist.org and volunteers who make posters of animals needing homes. Volunteer carpenters have made new cat trees for colony rooms. One couple knits and crochets dog and cat beds – they made 100 last month!

Volunteers help clean the kennels, groom the animals and take photos. We give our volunteers meaningful jobs, a lot of responsibility and a welcoming environment, but I think what drives many of them is the peace of mind knowing that the animals won't be killed.

Q. Where do you go from here?

A. Our goal is to get the community live release rate over 90%. We're there for dogs but we still have a ways to go for cats. We have seen significant results fairly quickly just by focusing on lifesaving.

About Bonney Brown: Bonney Brown is the Executive Director of Nevada Humane Society in Reno, Nevada. She is the former Chief Operating Officer for Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah. She also served as Best Friends' Communication Director and National No More Homeless Pets Director, and as the Campaign Director for Alley Cat Allies, a national feral cat advocacy program. She has written several manuals on grassroots fundraising and management for humane organizations, and is a speaker on these topics.

In 1992, Bonney founded Neponset Valley Humane Society in Canton, Massachusetts, and served as the organization's Executive Director for seven years, served as Vice-President of Doing Things for Animals for two years, and edited the first editions of the newsletter No-Kill News.