APA! has grown so much since we first dreamed of making Austin a No Kill City. We have accomplished our mission, but to maintain it, we need you.
It truly blows me away how much support we receive from the community. If we had to raise the funds to pay for the 140,000 hours of volunteer time, the 750 foster “kennels”, and the buildings we work in, honestly, we never could. But even with these resources, we still need to raise funds every year to keep saving lives.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be launching an Annual Fund Campaign that will shed light on how fundraising is critical to the programs that can’t survive without funding to pay staff, medical supplies, and utilities. We will tell you how much each program costs, the staff and volunteers and fosters and in kind/monetary donations that are required to run them, and create a way to give directly to those programs. These are the programs that are critical to the dogs and cats that are saved through them. I’m actually really excited to share this with you.
One thing you may not expect is that our single largest source of expense in real dollars is staff (81%!). We have over 100 employees. That may surprise you but we have made every hiring decision based on what we can’t get covered through volunteers and what we also can’t save lives without operationally. That means that every single position at APA! is critical to our ability to meet our mission of saving lives. And our mission matters. You and I both know that the animals that we save should be saved. There is no compromising that mission.
On the revenue side, there is no check from the heavens or from the city or from anywhere else that we can count on year to year. Our fundraising is just like our volunteering and fostering- it is dependent on the community we live in to donate, every year. In fact, more than half of our funds come from individuals and only 16% comes from adoption fees. Corporations, grants, and events combined cover just 23% of our annual need. It is not enough that last year thousands of people gave $100 or gave two hours a week of volunteer time - because this year’s animals need it too.
Across the country for most nonprofits, individual donations are down and APA! is suffering from it too. That combined with the annual trend of a summer donation slump and summer increase of pets in need has caused me real concern. Can you imagine a TLAC with only half the kennel cleaners or half the behavior team or half the medical team? That is the world that we look at it when we don’t have enough donations.
That world is terrifying to me and that is why I am asking you to join APA!, not only as the volunteer or foster who gives your heart and soul, but as a donor who understands how critical fundraising is to our mission.
Just as we say about volunteering, if we all pick up a small portion and do it, we can move a mountain together - no one can move it alone. We need you to give today, whatever you can, so that we all, as APA!, can continue pushing the mountain of No Kill forward.
