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Rich Avanzino |
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Widely recognized as a visionary and "outside the box" thinker, Richard Avanzino has had a major influence on the nation's animal welfare movement. As President of The San Francisco SPCA from 1976-1999, Avanzino led San Francisco to become the first City and and County in the nation to offer an adoption guarantee for every healthy shelter cat and dog (1994). This unprecedented guarantee prompted statewide legislation (California's Hayden Law) and sparked other cities, counties and states to follow his example. The vast majority of the City's sick and injured shelter animals were saved as well. In 1998, Avanzino revolutionized animal sheltering with the opening of Maddie's Pet Adoption Center, the first facility in the country in which cats and dogs awaiting adoption were housed in cozy home-like settings rather than cages. The radical design set a new national standard for sheltering practices and raised the status of sheltered animals. During his twenty-two year tenure as President of The SF/SPCA, Avanzino brought euthanasia rates down to the lowest of any urban center in the nation. He also created adoption, animal behavior, feral cat, and spay/neuter programs that have become models for the nation. Avanzino's demonstrated leadership prompted Maddie's Fund founders Dave and Cheryl Duffield to hire him as the first President in 1999. The goal of Maddie's Fund is to help create a no-kill nation where all healthy and treatable shelter dogs and cats are guaranteed a loving home. Avanzino focuses the $300 million family foundation's resources on building community collaborations where animal welfare organizations come together to develop successful models of lifesaving; veterinary colleges to help shelter medicine become part of the veterinary curriculum; private practice veterinarians to encourage greater participation in the animal welfare cause; and the implementation of national strategies to collect and report shelter statistics. As one of the no-kill movement's most articulate spokespeople, Avanzino has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, People Magazine, Parade Magazine, ABC's 20/20 and Person of the Week on the ABC Nightly News. Originally from the small town of Alameda, California, Avanzino received a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of California Medical Center and earned a Juris Doctor degree at the University of California at Davis Law School. |
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