What can an animal shelter do without the trust of the community? Not much. That’s why transparency and accountability are absolutely required to save all the healthy and treatable pets who come in the doors of your organization. But what can you do if not only the community but your own staff and volunteers already mistrust you?

That was the situation faced by Brent Toellner and the  Kansas City Pet Project, as he explained it to the audience at the Maddie’s Fund® Aha! Moment sessions at Animal Care Expo:

Four and a half years ago our organization, Kansas City Pet Project, took over the operations of the Kansas City, MO, municipal shelter. It’s a shelter that serves a population of about a half a million people every year. Until the shelter was privatized it was a very high kill shelter, like a lot of municipal shelters out there. Even the city’s first attempt at privatization was met with challenges, including allegations of cruelty and neglect against the shelter operator.

When Kansas City Pet Project took over we were a completely unknown organization, and a lot of people were skeptical about us and expected us to also fail in this endeavor. A few weeks after we took over, I got a frantic email from one of our volunteers. This is a volunteer who had been with the shelter prior to Kansas City Pet Project taking over, and was a great volunteer, very loyal, came out every Sunday to walk and socialize dogs. And she sent me this email about this dog named Barney.

She had been out the previous week and had fallen in love with Barney who was this really cute, shaggy terrier-type dog. When she came out the following week the first thing she did was run to Barney’s kennel because she wanted to go spend a little bit more time with Barney — but Barney wasn’t there. So she asked one of the staff people like, “Well, where’s Barney? What happened to Barney?” And when our staff told her that Barney had been adopted a couple days prior, she’s like, a little skeptical. She’s like, “Was he really adopted or did something really bad happen to Barney?” and they’re just trying to appease her? Was it the same old, same old of what had happened before?

It’s a natural reaction for people to assume the worst unless you give them a reason to assume otherwise. And from that day forward at the end of every single day, 365 days a year, Kansas City Pet Project posts the name of every single pet that is adopted, returned to its home or sent to another rescue organization. We do that because we want our volunteers to celebrate these dogs like Barney and the happy outcomes that are happening at our shelter. But even more important we want them to trust that good things are happening to dogs like Barney, so that there’s no question about what happened because we all know.

“It’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work and when Aha! moments strike, put them on a ‘to-do’ list for later,” Brent told us. “However, the sooner you put your good, lifesaving ideas to work for you, the more lives you’ll save and the easier the work will become.”

See the rest of Brent’s 6 minute talk below: