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Gee, with all the talk about it elsewhere, I'm surprised there hasn't been talk here about Maddie's Fund. [Maddie's Fund, BTW, is a huge foundation dedicated to increasing spays/neuters, increasing adoptions, and decreasing euthanasias, with the ultimate goal of creating a no-kill nation.] There was a lot of coverage of it at the No-Kill Conference in Lisle. As much as was covered, we still had a lot of questions, and were wondering what experiences others have had, and what we can expect.
1) Seems like Maddie's Fund has an inherent Catch-22. They want to see a well-established program in place before they will grant it. The phrase I heard more than once at the conference was that if you get the check on Monday, you have to be in operation Tuesday. This obviously requires a huge amount of planning and organizing up-front (the estimates at the conference were 6 mos to a year), and a fair amount of money to do this planning/organizing. There's the catch; if you're just a bunch of grass-roots rescuers, with perhaps one or two shelters in your corner, where and how do you raise the money necessary to put together a program that is suitable, ultimately, to receive Maddie's Fund money.
2) Our area will be a sort of textbook case. Dane County is (population-wise) just about half rural, half urban, about 250,000 each. The biggest city by far, at 190,000, is Madison, dead smack in the middle of the county. Madison is a college town (read: lots of abandoned cats), and even though it's prosperous, has its pockets of poverty. This raises several questions for us: a) How do we approach the farmers about their farm cats? How do we get them accept a mobile spay/neuter unit? How do we gather statistics about rural companion animals, and the population issues? b) How do we determine the role of a mobile spay/neuter unit in the low-income areas? How do we determine the need for it, or for a low-cost clinic, or a shuttle to take animals to a low-cost clinic? c) How do we get the student population involved? d) How should we allocate resources between the rural and urban needs? How do we the importance of each relative to the other?
3) We'd like this effort to involve _every_ animal rescuer in the county, no matter how big or small. (Well, at least those who want to get involved). But how do we find such people? Where do we announce that we're doing this, and we want rescuers to contact us?
If anybody out there has had to wrestle with questions like these, I'd love to hear from you. If you can, please Email me at 'ptoleary at chorus dot net' (get it?) as well as replying to the NG. As you might guess, we're just getting started, but as we go further in the process, certainly we'll be willing to share our experiences as well.
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