Our mission is to revolutionize the status and well-being of companion animals.
Maddie’s Fund®, the Pet Rescue Foundation (www.maddiesfund.org), is a family foundation established in 1999 to help fund the creation of a no-kill nation. The first step is to help create programs that guarantee loving homes for all healthy shelter dogs and cats throughout the country. The next step will be to save the sick and injured pets in animal shelters nationwide.
Dave Duffield, Founder of PeopleSoft, Inc., and his wife Cheryl, created Maddie’s Fund. The Foundation makes good on a promise the Duffields made to their beloved Miniature Schnauzer, Maddie, to give back to her kind in dollars that which Maddie gave to them in friendship and love. Maddie passed away in 1997, but thanks to this one little dog, abandoned shelter animals have new opportunities to find loving homes in which they, too, may share in the joy, love and companionship that Dave and Cheryl enjoyed with Maddie.
Maddie’s Fund supports collaborative efforts in which entire cities and counties pool their talents and resources to build a safety net of care for the community’s dogs and cats. The Foundation awards millions of dollars through multi-year grants to animal welfare coalitions to end the killing of healthy shelter dogs and cats community-wide. Funded projects must produce an immediate and measurable increase in adoptions and reduction in shelter deaths to demonstrate progress towards the goal.
Maddie’s Fund also looks to the veterinary community to help achieve the no-kill nation goal through grants to state, county, regional or city veterinary medical associations. Private practice veterinarians are encouraged to participate in Maddie-supported low-income spay/neuter programs to help reduce the numbers of unwanted pets entering animal shelters.
In addition, Maddie’s Fund offers grants to colleges of veterinary medicine to establish Shelter Medicine Programs so that the specialized knowledge and skills of these institutions’ faculty and students can be incorporated into the effort to save all healthy and treatable shelter pets nationwide.
The Foundation is now expanding its grant giving to capitalize on the innovation taking place in the animal welfare movement. It is looking to invest in leadership with a demonstrated ability to create change and to save lives. It is seeking to fund pilot programs that promise new problem solving methods. And, it is looking to actively reward organizations and communities that are leading the way in achieving lifesaving goals.
Grantmaking efforts will continue to focus on organizations that honor the foundation’s core values of honesty, integrity and mutual respect.
