Animal Advocates

Best Friends Animal Society awarded grant to support saving dogs' and cats' lives in shelters across Texas.

The Meadows Foundation has awarded national animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society $100,000 to deepen its work across Texas with local animal shelters to sustain and expand no-kill practices.

“Momentum for increased lifesaving and no-kill is building across Texas, but there is still so much to do — and Best Friends has proven solutions to fix this problem. With help from The Meadows Foundation, Best Friends, and our 250-plus partnering organizations across this state can keep fighting for the lives of companion animals and make Texas a no-kill state by 2025,” said Lee Ann Shenefiel, director South Central Region, Best Friends Animal Society.

The grant will be used by Best Friends to provide training, coaching, and mentoring to partnering Texas animal shelters. The ambitious goals of the grant include adding shelter partners, improving lifesaving outcomes, and increasing the number of shelters across Texas with no-kill status.

Shenefiel concluded, “Combining direct animal service training, coaching, and mentoring with community engagement and legislative action — has had astonishing success in several Texas cities such as Dallas, El Paso, Houston, Palm Valley, and Harlingen. We know no-kill in every shelter and every community is possible with the resources needed to sustain and scale our work through these challenging times. Through a partnership with the Meadows Foundation, Best Friends will be able to engage with and provide lifesaving resources to more shelters and communities across Texas.”

In 2019 Best Friends launched the pet lifesaving dashboard, an award-winning data visualization tool that recently garnered Best Friends a spot in Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies in the world for data science. Best Friends’ pet livesaving dashboard provides comprehensive “noses in and noses out” information to the public right down to the shelter level and shows how many animals are entering and leaving U.S. shelter systems regardless of category (healthy, treatable, owner requested euthanasia, etc.).

For more information, visit BestFriends.org