Animal Justice League: Kia Pet Adoption Grant Report

How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?

Our objective with this grant was to support fee-reduced cat and dog adoptions. We were able to channel this generously awarded grant to our "adoption-fee sponsorship" program by waiving our adoption fees for foster animals that were adopted out of state via our transport partners.

When AJL executes a partner adoption this way, we cover all pre-transport vetting (shots, health cert, often a spay-neuter, and heartworm). Our adoption fees exist to cover standard vetting for all fosters, so by waiving these fees via transport, we lose money. Nonetheless, we still execute this style of adoption to facilitate faster adoptions or increase adoption opportunities for locally harder-to-adopt pets.

This grant is allowing us stay cost-neutral for about six animals (three dogs and three cats) and therefore scaling our capacity to adopt via transport without sacrificing our parallel local adoption operations and funding.

The pets recently transported or pending transport for whom our fees are waived: dogs Maisie, Shiloh, and Poppy; and cats Taffie Mae, Bruno, and Bunny.

How many pets did this grant help?

6

Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.

Maisie was an under-1-year-old Lab mix puppy who was found by her foster wandering in her backyard. Upon her rescue, she required an urgent surgery to remove a foreign body from her stomach.

Because of her age, breed, behavior, and prior vetting status (covered jointly by her finder and AJL), Maisie qualified for transport and adoption with partners Rescue Pets Movement and Mile High Lab Rescue (Colorado).

AJL waived our $275 puppy-adoption fee in order to facilitate the immediate adoption of Maisie in Colorado; otherwise, she was likely to have stayed in our foster program in Houston for three to six months.

While AJL has an existing adoption-fee sponsorship program that relies on individual or corporate donors to cover vetting and admin costs for individual animals like Maisie, attracting these donors individually can be inconsistent and time-consuming.

We had an amazing opportunity to get Maisie into a forever home quickly, so the Petfinder Foundation’s Kia grant allowed us to massively scale this adoption-fee waiver scheme and set Maisie up for a wonderful forever home. Thank you!