When you’re a No Kill advocate, you are faced with a standard patter of protests for why it can’t work in whichever particular instance you’re in;
– There are too many pets and not enough homes: all the while puppy farms exist/ breeders breed/ irresponsible people don’t care/ the government doesn’t do something…
– No one wants to adopt: cats/ staffies/ big dogs/ old dogs/ a dog that needs training/ working breeds…
– Our community is different: it’s rural/ it’s low income/ it’s full of bogans/ it’s full of full time workers who don’t understand what it takes to care for a pet/ they buy their pets from pet stores/ they don’t desex/ they just don’t seem to care…
– Our pets are different: they’re stray cats/ they’re unsocialised dogs/ they’re not what people in our area want/ they’re not easy to move…
– We’re different: we’re really small/ we’re really large/ no one knows about us so no one comes/ everyone knows about us so they give us their pets…
– We can’t do better: because we don’t have the resources/ we take in too many pets/ we work under restrictive legislation/ we are no worse than anywhere else…
Of course every shelter, everywhere has these same challenges. Some kill, some find ways not to. The difference is how they choose to approach their work and their communities. It doesn’t matter where the shelter is located or what resources they have available to them, the biggest hurdle any organisation has to setting themselves on a No Kill path, is overcoming the belief that their situation is so different and uniquely terrible and their community so irresponsible and unsupportable that any change in approach would be futile.
However, the sad reality is that an organisation cluttered and hamstrung by a culture of ‘there is nothing we can do, we are simply the victims here’ is deadly to pets.
It’s why you see groups lobby hard for new laws ‘if only we had XXX law, then we’d see an improvement here at the shelter’ only to get that law, and see things remain exactly the same as before. Because the real change, the most significant change, has to come from within the organisation. You can’t influence and lead your community to No Kill goals, if you, in your heart believe they are your biggest problem.
So how do you redesign your own organisations to effectively harness the compassion that seems so available to successful shelters? You have to choose to believe in abundance:
More people want to help us than we believe.
….We have to think not just in terms of what we can do, as individuals, within our organization, but we have to believe that the necessary skills are out there — we just need to find them.
…Believing about abundance is very much believing in the possible and in setting up organizations that are geared for it. It doesn’t mean that work is easy — the problems are still hard problems. But it does mean belief that real help is available from outside the organizational walls.
…So, if we are building organizations on the abundance of goodwill, energy and eager hands — and if we are thinking of ourselves, organizationally, as platforms for change rather than agents for change. If we thinking that way, what are the organizational structures that we have to build?
No Kill is cemented in the belief of abundance. Of not only,
You don’t build a No Kill shelter by ‘not killing pets’ (although the belief that a shelter’s obligation is to save lives, is definitely at the core), you build it by first reaching out to the community to establish what resources they have that can help you – developing the relationships both inside and outside the industry you need to succeed – and finally calling on the public to take ownership of the mission your organisation has set yourself.
You’re not building a ‘No Kill shelter’, but a No Kill community, which has free access to your organisation, an understanding of your achievements and failures, and an open invitation to not only contribute and support, but to involve themselves as much, or as little as they would like.
All the while we believe the public ‘are the problem’, we sit as gatekeepers behind self-created walls, gnashing about how no one cares and no one supports our work.
The drive of the No Kill movement has created an exciting new future for rescue. We’ve seen we don’t have to be angry to be effective – in fact those groups who have moved towards embracing their public are kicking huge goals. We don’t have to make it our job to punish people – we can accept that some people are simply shitheads and move swiftly on to finding hundreds of people who are compassionate, like us, to help us with our work. We don’t have to show people the horrors of rescue – we can instead celebrate the positives, the happy endings and the beauty of second chances.
Deciding to have and maintain a positive outlook isn’t simply being naive, but choosing to believe in abundance and becoming more effective for doing so.
Our most important work now, is to take advantage of the opportunities a belief in abundance offers and design and build the kinds of organisations for the future that will both embrace and lead the revolution. What will our shelters look like, when they are a reflection of the progressive values of the pet-loving community?
Big problems; community solutions…
WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.
I love this take — the idea that you aren’t building an organization with a set of beliefs but working to make a community that will support that set of beliefs.
I don’t know… maybe our problem over here is that we’ve almost succeeded but now we’re losing ground because the community by and large still thinks the main problem is too many animals whereas things have moved on and the problem of finding enough money to save treatable animals is the key issue.
That creates an issue of trust because it appears that we’re continually greedily appealing for funds and less for people who want to help with practical animal care.
Fund raising is a science and a black art ;) but I do think those who will be the most successful at it in the future are those who recognise that along with the benefits of this new level of ‘connection’ to our supporters, comes a new level of obligation.
Whereas in the past people were happy to donate a couple of times a year to whichever major animal charity got to them first, people are wanting to know more about groups and their work than ever before.
There used to be ‘broadcasts to supporters’ – now there’s a constant feedback loop. They want to ‘own’ their community organisations. They want weekly or even daily insight into operations. They want to be able to show off their ‘membership’ to particular organisations to their friends.
Harness that need to connect, and it’s incredibly powerful. Try to sit in a crystal palace, keeping a strategic distance from your supporters… and those small grassrootsy groups, the ones who almost do this naturally, they’re gonna offer something you can’t and steal away your resources.
Having worked for large animal welfare orgs, I know they often do this connection *really* badly. They are still under some illusion that their ‘brand’ will be enough to keep people rushing to support them. “We don’t need to answer to them, we’re the (insert name of large animal org here)”.
But the truth is the future is changing. As commercial businesses are realising conversation is king, so must we non-profits if we want to keep our supporters connected to our missions.
I’m less concerned about “resource stealing” by other grassroots animal rescue groups – who cares, so long as the work gets done – than about people becoming disillusioned with the idea of getting involved in practical animal welfare altogether, because it’s not what they expect.
The National Society (as opposed to the branches) is trying quite hard to show what’s actually being done on the ground – see for example their twitter feed which is copied directly from the control centre data (hence the shouty all-caps) http://twitter.com/RSPCA_Frontline
Part of the time, I guess the answer is to be thankful for the things that do touch people’s hearts – even if the result is inconvenient http://www.rspca.org.uk/media/news/story/-/article/EM_Time_to_throw_in_the_towel_on_our_seal_appeal_Oct10
But I still wish the kindly person in Sweden had sent a cheque instead!