Cabot Animal Support Services: REDI Implementation Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
Through the REDI Implementation Grant, we have been working towards being more inclusive and equitable in our marketing materials. We are currently placing marketing flyers in locations that had previously been (unintentionally) ignored.
Our materials are slowly being translated from English to Spanish with the help of Google Translate and we are currently in conversations with a non-profit translation service to assist with this effort.
We have also employed a local photographer to conduct a media blitz, hosting pictures of adopters, fosters, and volunteers who are more diverse and inclusive. This will begin when everything is green and it dries out some. The current weather conditions are not conducive to outdoor photography at the shelter.
Being more inclusive and showing the community that we are extremely accepting of people from diverse backgrounds will allow for a more successful adoption and volunteer/foster program, thereby helping out more pets within our community.
How many pets did this grant help?
Our previous year's intake total was 1,022. This grant will assist with every pet that resides at the shelter because it will open up our programs to more individuals who may have previously felt that they didn't belong.
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Through our addition of new marketing methods to reach a more diverse scope of individuals, we placed a “Pet of the Week” ad for Maxwell in our state newspaper.
Maxwell was a large, seemingly set-in-his-ways adult black dog who continued to be overlooked, day after day. Thanks to this ad, we had multiple people reach out to us.
One call was from an elderly citizen who lived an hour away. She was interested in meeting and possibly adopting Maxwell. She previously wouldn’t have been our ideal adopter for a dog of his size, but because of our REDI training to become more inclusive, we gave it a shot.
To our surprise, she chose to adopt Maxwell and took him home that day! We were ecstatic that he had finally found his new family!
