One shelter enlists people seeking to surrender cats to foster them until they’re ready for adoption.

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It’s a common story: Someone needs to surrender a pet, calls every shelter in the area, and is told they’re all full. Needless to say, the situation doesn’t lend itself to a positive outcome. So Sun Cities 4 Paws Rescue, Inc., a cat-only shelter in Youngtown, Arizona, decided to work with community members seeking to surrender rather than presenting them with yet another dead end.

“We started a Surrender to Foster program in which we ask the person wanting to surrender if they would be willing to ‘foster’ the cat or kittens until we are ready for actual intake. It turns a six-week (or longer) waiting period into a three-week one,” grant writer Angie Grams said in her grant report.

“The person wanting to surrender signs the cat over to us and we do all the needed veterinary care: vaccinations, testing, sterilization, etc., while the cat resides in the home of the person surrendering.

“This is beneficial to both Sun Cities 4 Paws and the surrendering person. We keep much-needed cage space, reduce illness, and reduce the length of stay, since the cat will not actually come into the shelter until they are adoption-ready. And the surrendering person is able to turn the cat over to us much sooner than if they had to wait for available space.”

I spoke with Sun Cities 4 Paws President Ninette Sellar about the program.

When did you start Surrender to Foster?

It’s been going on since the middle of 2022. So almost a year ago. 

How did the idea come about?

We always were looking for innovations. Our board doesn’t have a background in shelter management, so we’re all learning as we go. We had a change in staff leadership, so it was an opportunity for us to try new things. We were looking for ways to reduce our length of stay and involve our community more. And part of the Maddie’s Fund We Foster Challenge was [to find] a way to work with other organizations who are also trying to be innovative. We joined in their group meetings and developed what I think is now a really successful Surrender to Foster program. 

What has the impact been on your organization and your pet population?

Just in the six months in 2022 that we were doing this, we were able to bring on 30 fosters through the program and 120 cats. Initially we thought it was just going to be owner-surrenders, but there’s no reason not to offer it to people who have found cats, or who are taking care of their neighbor’s abandoned cat. We found that, when people understand that there’s not an open place, and they’ve called two or three other shelters and they’re all full, it becomes, “Okay, well at least we know it’s [only] a three-week commitment.” You know, they want to help the cat. And when they learn what the challenges are to the shelters, they become part of the solution.

What’s been really great too is that some of the fosters that we’ve recruited through the Surrender to Foster program have continued to be fosters for us.

What are some of the issues people bring up when they’re resistant to the idea of fostering? Allergies, other pets in the home, not enough space?

Certainly all of those. I think that the biggest resistance is, “I need this cat out now; I’m moving tomorrow,” or “My mom passed away and we’re only here for a little while cleaning the house.” And for those kinds of things, we figure it out. But for those that have the opportunity, we talk to ‘em.

But I think the biggest challenge is, we have a veterinarian who comes in once a week, so there’s a really specific day and time that we need the cats back in the shelter for vaccinations, exams, and all of that. That’s really the biggest challenge: You’re going to have to take a weekday morning, three times during the cat’s stay, to bring the cat in.

Are you an all-volunteer organization? 

No, we have 10 paid staff and the rest are volunteers. We do not have a vet on staff.

You know, they want to help the cat. And when they learn what the challenges are to the shelters, they become part of the solution.”

Have you had to enlist staff or volunteers to go out to people’s homes, whether to pick up a cat and bring it to the vet or to deliver supplies? 

No. We haven’t offered that. Not any more than we usually do, and we don’t do it very often. Usually that’s reserved for our legacy cats, cats that have been registered with us for us to be able to go in and take care of them when the owner no longer can.

If I call you and I say, “I have this cat. My family member passed away, I can’t keep her, can you take her?” How would the conversation go?

Well if we have space, then we would absolutely take them. If we have space but, you know, sometimes it sounds like they don’t really want to part with them, but they know the cat’s just not going to fit in their life, we do offer — we offer it to everybody: “If you are available to keep the cat for three weeks and let them stay in a home, that will keep them out of a cage and they’ll go straight to our adoption center.” And for somebody who’s grieving, that sounds really good, that they can keep their mom’s cat out of a stressful situation. 

Because if a cat is not vaccinated or altered, it will be in the shelter but not available for adoption for, is it three weeks, generally? 

Yeah. About three weeks.

What if I’m saying, “Listen, the cat is scratching up my furniture. I’m just over it.” How would that conversation go?

If we have space and we can accommodate, we will. If we don’t have space, we’ll say, “We can help you with your cat, but the only way we can do that is if you basically foster the cat for us for three weeks.” And I think that people who are trying to rehome their cats appreciate that, after they call the other shelters and find out how nobody else is going to take ‘em. What we forget is that, while I’m in this world every day, the callers that we get are not. When they finally make the decision to rehome their cat, this is all very new to them. So they think, “I can just call and take the cat to a shelter.”

So there’s some education, and I think that it’s important to always keep the frame of mind that you’re a nonprofit and you’re working with your community. You really have to involve the community in what your mission is. We can’t do it by ourselves, so we’re always looking for ways to engage our community, through donations, through volunteers, and through helping them take care of their cats.

Do people have an easier time wrapping their heads around three weeks because it’s a clear-cut, finite time frame?

Absolutely. Even if we find that the cat is going to take longer than three weeks [to become adoptable], like if they have a really bad mouth and need a dental, we can say, it’s going to take a little longer, but the intake is going to be this time. So if you want to keep the cat a little longer, great. If not, we’ve made the commitment that it’s going to be three weeks and we’ll take the cat. And sometimes then we find another foster who’s willing to take on an adult cat who needs a dental. I don’t think we’ve had many say, “Okay, I’ll keep him for three more months because that’s how long the wait is for a dental.” 

Have you ever not had the space at the end of the three weeks?

No. We figure it out. We kind of know what’s coming in. And we do keep a couple of empty banks in case there’s a dump or whatever. There was one week where we had to do some pop-ups, but that was the week before a spay/neuter, so we had so many [cats in the shelter] anyway.

So you have some flexibility.

Yeah.

Have you found that this program has changed your organization’s relationship with your community?

The best and biggest change is that, for our staff and volunteers who are answering phones, it’s not a bunch of, “No, we don’t have space, call the other shelters,” when we know they don’t have space. It’s been great to be able to say, “We have another option. We don’t have space, but we have another option, so let’s work together on this.” 

And then kind of like, tightening up our description of the program. That took a minute to wrap our brains around, so that our staff and volunteers who answer the phones really understand what it is well enough to be able to explain it. That took a minute to work out, but now we have a script.    

There was a lot of nervousness that people were not going like it, and be put out that we were asking for help. But we’ve really found the opposite: that it’s been great to have one more way to offer to help. 

Has it changed your staff’s and volunteers’ perspectives on the people who are surrendering?

That’s a tough one. We’re still working on that. But as we have conversations with people, [we’ve learned that] very few of our Surrender to Fosters have been owner-surrenders. It’s not usually their longtime pet cat that they’re trying to bring in. It’s somebody else’s cat, or a cat they found in the community, or the litter of a pregnant mom who showed up at their workplace. 

We didn’t expect to find that. But I think by having the conversations with them, we get to learn more, [and understand that] it’s not just somebody trying to get rid of their cat. It’s somebody who’s really working to help a cat that they didn’t expect to encounter.

We’re always looking for ways to engage our community, through donations, through volunteers, and through helping them take care of their cats.”

Have you found that having the foster period cuts down on stress for the cats and makes them more adoptable once they come in?

Yeah. I think so. We’ve got fewer cats getting sick because they’re not getting exposed to [contagions] in the shelter, so we get healthier cats that go straight to the adoption centers. I think some of the staff wish they had more time with the cats so they could get to know them and describe their traits, but there’s plenty of other cats. We’ve got about 120 cats at our shelter at any given time, so there are other cats they can get to know [laughs].

Does the foster provide a description of the cat’s personality once they bring it in? 

Yeah, that’s part of the paperwork at the time of surrender, so that we get some description. Some of the fosters, although not always, are like, “Here’s the cat. I did my part, bye.” And then of course when the cats are in the adoption centers, the adoption staff get to hang out with them and can update adopters on what the cat’s behavior is.

How does it work financially? 

We do let them know what our surrender fee is. We have gotten some eyerolls, like, “Wait, so you want me to give you money and then I take care of this cat?” We have been flexible if we know that there’s a need. We also provide food, supplies, and litter when they ask for it, so we let them know that we can offer that. But we are a nonprofit [laughs].

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned through the course of this program?

We didn’t start out collecting or tracking these cats separately in our shelter-management system. So we were like, “Wait, what are our numbers? Well I don’t know, who’s been tracking it?” We had to manually go back. We’re still trying to figure out how to work with our shelter data system to separate this data, because we think it’s important to track it. We’re still hand-counting it.

Over the last year, or couple of years, we’ve been trying new things. We’ve been developing a culture where it’s okay to try and fail, and learn from it, and some of it works and some of it doesn’t. Surrender to Foster has been fun because it’s almost universally successful.

Do you have a sense of how much Surrender to Foster has increased your intake?

Last year it was 120 cats that we would have had to delay intake on. Last year we adopted out 750 cats.

It’s been great to be able to say, ‘We have another option. We don’t have space, but we have another option, so let’s work together on this.’ “

What advice would you offer an organization thinking of trying something like this?

There really isn’t a downside. We have volunteer foster coordinators, and it hasn’t significantly increased the amount of work that they have to do. It’s the same as with a brand new foster volunteer: We have the same training and on-boarding.

People doing Surrender to Foster go through your standard foster training?

Yes. At the time of intake, we go over with them what it looks like, what dates we’re expecting them to bring the cat in for vaccinations and exams. And we give them a foster handbook that includes an emergency phone number. We make some assumptions that this is not the first time that they’ve had contact with a cat.

Do they often need basic supplies?

No. For the ones who have found a pregnant mom or little kittens, we have this really cute bag that has toys and all the other supplies a kitten foster might need. For bottle babies, it’s got bottles and formula.

We keep the foster [supply] closet replenished. “Do you have toys? What do you need? Let’s make sure you get it.”

Has someone ever gone through the program and decided to keep the cat?

Yes, actually! It was litter of three kittens they’d found. The family got covid during the time, so when they finally were able to start coming back, they were pretty attached. Two of the kittens they found homes for, and they kept one. So those cats had zero shelter time [laughs].

How many new foster homes have you added through this program?

We had 30 [Surrender to Fosters] and I would say probably 10 of them have continued or offered to stay on as fosters, which is amazing. And two of those live in communities where there are a lot of friendly community cats because people have been dropping off cats, or when they move, they leave them. [The Surrender to Foster volunteer realizes that,] “If I foster these cats in groups, I can clean up my community, I can get these friendly cats away from being coyote food.” That has been an unexpected benefit. 

One community had probably 15 orange cats, all related. [The volunteer] has been really grateful, because she’d been feeding them. She started taking in the quantity that she could house in her home, and I think we’re down to the last three. That’s been a fun part of this experiment. 

–Emily Fromm, Chief Development Officer

An innovative program treats adoption returns as opportunities rather than failures.

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When Prairie Paws Animal Shelter in Ottawa, Kansas, received our $3,000 Kia Pet Adoption Grant to reduce or waive adoption fees, Executive Director Vanessa Cowie decided to try out an innovative approach to adoptions: The shelter waived fees for cats and dogs who’d been at the shelter longer than two weeks, and adopters were told they could return the pets at any time, for any reason, with no financial downside — and, more importantly, no judgment.

“Waiving the adoption fees allowed adopters to try out dogs in the home they typically wouldn’t have tried,” Cowie wrote in her grant report. “If the adoption didn’t work out, the dog could be returned, risk-free, and the adopter could try another dog.”

The results? “These trial adoptions were incredibly successful,” Cowie wrote. “Not only did this grant help us place 39 of our pets into loving homes, these 39 were our pets with the longest lengths of stay.”

I spoke with Cowie to get more information about this new approach to pet returns.

How did you get the idea for this program?

Every shelter has long-stay dogs. What we noticed is that if they stay with us for two weeks, they are more likely to stay with us for six months. It was almost like this two-week period was an indicator. 

I knew that the Petfinder Foundation did these fee-waived [grants], and I needed a way to fund the adoption fees of that population of dogs and cats without sacrificing the shelter’s revenue. [So] we could fund an idea, and it was risk-free for us and risk-free for the adopters. It was like, we’re going to get the adoption fee anyway, so let’s target the population of dogs that need this.  

We also realized that, if they get returned once, they’re more likely to get returned twice. So it was like, ok, these dogs that stay here for more than two weeks, and cats as well, if they get returned after that amount of time, they are statistically more likely to get returned again. So let’s look at this as if they are definitely going to be returned. And how will we approach this now that we know that this is the most likely outcome?

That totally changed the way we approached those adoption consultations. Having this Petfinder Foundation funding, it was like: “Don’t worry about the adoption fee. These cats and dogs are fee-waived for a reason: We need them to go into two homes before they find their forever home. Can you be one of the homes that helps them get one step closer to their forever home?” 

The adopters were like, “I get that you need basically two households to try this dog or cat out to give you enough information to know what their forever home even looks like.” 

When a pet would get returned, we had a Google sheet that listed the date, which animal it was that was funded by the grant, and — say it was a $100 dog adoption fee; it would say “Spencer, $100,” and the date, and it just calculated. If Spencer came back, which he did — and most of them did, that was the point — then we would take him off the list. So it’s not like he consumed grant money every time he got adopted. It was that for that one dog, the grant funded him coming in and out three times during that [period]. And of all the animals that we adopted through this, there was only one out of all those 39 that came back outside of the grant period. So they all got forever homes except for one, of 39. And those animals had been with us for a long, long time.

We need them to go into two homes before they find their forever home. Can you be one of the homes that helps them get one step closer to their forever home?”

Could you do it without the sponsored adoption fees? Say, offer two-week trial adoptions and then charge the fee at the end of that period if the family decides to keep the pet?

I think what changed the whole program was that we didn’t give people a timeline. We didn’t say the trial was two weeks, 10 days, or three weeks. They didn’t know how long they had to find a behavior problem. They could still return these animals tomorrow if they wanted to. We didn’t give them a deadline. We didn’t know when to charge [the adoption fee,] because we never did.

It just takes the revenue piece out of the equation.

Yeah. Now we know, too, that about $2,000 to $3,000 is what it takes to run this for a month, with a shelter of our size, and get 40 of our most difficult animals out. So if we did that twice a year, we know what we need to run it, how long to run it, and what the results should be. Which is awesome!

When someone returned one of the pets, did you go through a debriefing with them to get information to add to the pet’s file?

Yes. We would tell them that at the time of adoption, “This animal got returned once before.” And they would go, “Oh, how horrifying!” And we would say, “No no no no, the reason we’re telling you is because we learned X, Y, and Z. So you may very well want to return this dog because of those behaviors, and it’s fine. They’re fine.” And we would also tell them, “Don’t be afraid of returning. It’s the same as a foster.”

We had to change our volunteers’ perception of this, because they would villainize anyone who returned an animal.

That was my next question. That’s a dramatic mindset change.

Right. As soon as we knew we wanted returns, and were encouraging returns in a different way, we had to totally take down [the notion] that somehow this was traumatic to the dog. You know, volunteers would take dogs home to foster for the weekend. Do you think the dog knows the difference between being fostered and being adopted and returned? No, they don’t! There’s no research to support that they’re traumatized by the in and out process. 

The sentence that we started to say was: This dog needs to be returned three times. Statistically, the pattern we’re seeing with this dog is, he needs three experiences in a home. You’re not willing to foster him, but an adopter is willing to take him home for two weeks or three weeks or whatever they’re comfortable with. And we’d actually process the adoption, so they are legally the owner of that dog, but they get to bring him back any time, which is already our policy.

[We had] to tell the volunteers that: That returns are really helpful for difficult dogs, we learn more, we go into it knowing that they’re likely to get returned, we communicate that to the adopter, and we get multiple debriefs. We get adopters going, “Hey, you know how you said that the last home said he wasn’t good with dogs? Well, we know why that is. It was because of a certain situation. With our neighbor’s dog, they got along great, but we had them in this circumstance.”

And so we could piece together a better version of the story, have a lot more information, and be able to communicate that to the next person.

Ollie was the one that I put in the grant report. That dog had been through our shelter double-digit times! 

Do you think the dog knows the difference between being fostered and being adopted and returned? No, they don’t!”

Did his final adopters have a 30-foot wall?

(Laughs) He was beautiful — a gorgeous purebred golden retriever, just stunning. Never knew a stranger; the most friendly dog on the planet. And so when you say “Ollie’s been returned nine times,” they’re like, “Oh my god, why?” And we could say specifically what type of fence would keep him in and specifically what type of crate would work, because we had nine people experiment with him.

And every one of those people who returned Ollie adopted a different dog from us. So we didn’t lose adopters. And we communicated that at the time of adoption, too: “If it doesn’t work out, we really encourage you to meet another dog, because we will learn more about your lifestyle and the type of dog that is a good fit for you. And when you bring this one back, I bet you there’s another one you can try.”

So we had these families bringing in, taking out, saying, “Ollie did this, this, and this; I really think the next home should use this type of fence because our neighbors had that type of fence and he never got out of that, but we just can’t change our fence and we would like a dog that’s more like this.”

So it became more of like, a trying on shoes experience (laughs).

So rather than villainizing people who return pets, you’re engaging them as your research team so they become your collaborators rather than your opponents.

One other big thing we had to change, [was that] our adoption counselors used to take a photo with the pet [upon adoption] and post every single one on social media. And I said, we’re stopping this, because the return rate is 12%.

That was a really hard pill to swallow for the volunteers, because they want to celebrate every single adoption in real time, and it’s like, but that’s not the world we live in. You’ve put so much pressure on that family now to keep that dog forever, when it may not be a good fit. And I know that dog has a return history of eight times! We’re not celebrating this adoption! We’re not going “Al finally got a home” until we know that [the adopters are] really comfortable with us celebrating it.

So we don’t celebrate every single adoption. We celebrate very specific ones, or we have an alumni [Facebook] page where we let them celebrate themselves, so adopters can, in their own time, go, “Hey, it’s really working out with Al. I know you guys really liked him. Here’s some photos of him, we’re hiking, we’re doing this.” 

We even stopped using this language of “forever home.” Because these are just regular human beings trying to adopt a dog. 

Is it still a struggle with the volunteers?

It’s still a struggle with some. We have volunteers who have been with the organization for 15 years. Change is hard, and this was a lot of change in a really short amount of time. And with my leadership style, there’s been a lot of reducing the barriers to adoption and eliminating as many as we can. So this was just another ingredient in a much bigger pie: “AND we’re not going to call landlords, AND we’re not going to require that people have a fence, AND we’re not going to look up the BSL ordinances in your town if you want to adopt a pit bull.” 

How did you get your staff on board?

We cross train, so our adoption counselors and our animal-care technicians are the same employees. On some days they’re cleaning kennels, they’re medicating, they’re exercising dogs, and they’re running playgroups. And on other days, they’re at the front desk processing adoptions.

The reason I wanted it that way — obviously we have a small enough staff, we only have 10 employees — I wanted them to know the dogs. So when they were adopting out a dog, I didn’t want them to go, “Hey, I don’t know anything about this dog; let me go get someone who does.” I wanted them to say, “He does this in playgroups, he loves the pool.”

But I also wanted them to have a vested interest in getting them out. And if you are in animal care, you get attached to the dogs; you want to see them get out. I don’t have to tell you to do it because you want it to happen. So I really didn’t have to get any buy-in from the staff, because every single adoption counselor has a vested interest in the best outcome for every animal because they care for them every day.

Did having this different attitude toward adopters change your shelter’s relationship with your community?

Yeah. it did. Even the way they talked about the shelter on the alumni page was different. And the Google reviews, all the stuff that you shouldn’t read late at night but you do (laughs). A perfect story was a dog who came through the Kia promotion a couple times — Neo, a three-legged pit bull — who finally got a really good home. And that adopter just recently posted on the alumni page, “Hey! I know everyone really loved Neo. Here he is with our kids at the park.”

And another alumni was like, “I had Neo for two weeks! That’s so awesome! Now I have Sarge.” And someone else wrote, “Hey, I had Sarge for two weeks!”

So they really become a community themselves.

They did. And there was no, “You jerk, you returned Neo.” It was like, “Yeah, but we ended up with this dog instead.” It totally changed the dynamic of pet owners to pet owners. It got everyone off their high horse. No one was self-righteous, because no one’s the perfect pet owner any more. There was no, “You failed the dog.” It was, “You did the right thing, because now look at the home he’s in, and now look at the dog you have, and look how perfect those families look now.” Whereas if you switched those dogs, [you’d have] two very unhappy families.

[In addition,] we also then got to go, we are not really going to vet you that closely. Because if it doesn’t work out, bring him back. We’re not going to go, “Oh you don’t run three miles a day, every day?”

I think it made us much less judgmental and easier to work with. There was a free flow of information [from adopters]. They would say, “Hey, we left him in a crate for eight hours and he did this.” Normally they would lie about that. They would say, “We were walking him 12 times a day and he still chewed up the sofa.”

[Instead,] it was “We did this, and this was the outcome,” whereas I think if you go into it [with the attitude that], “You need to be the very best pet owner every single day for the rest of this pet’s life,” they will never communicate to you the situations in which these incidents happened.

So it made everyone more transparent. It made the adopters much more accepting of each other, it made the volunteers happier over time because now they can see these posts. It’s just a slower thing, because Neo’s adopter didn’t post until August and they got him in May, and the whole time, the volunteers were like, “They’ve probably got him locked in a dungeon, they probably sold him on Craigslist.”

It’s just like, give the adopters time to feel comfortable enough to promote their own experience. We’re not going to take that from them, and it will be so much more genuine and so much more worth the wait when you see this real piece of information that we didn’t choreograph and we didn’t script from here at the shelter. We’re now seeing a change of mindset in the volunteers because we’re starting to see happy endings.

There was no, ‘You failed the dog.’ It was, ‘You did the right thing, because now look at the home he’s in.’ “

Pets take a few months to settle in and decompress, so if you get feedback after that, you know it’s authentic.

Yup. Everyone just had to take a little bit of pressure off of everyone else. Take the pressure off the dog, off the staff, off the adopter; everyone just relax a little and try it out and see how it goes. 

Having the funding to back it was important too, because the people who bust their butts to raise money, they needed to know that we weren’t sacrificing $3,000 in adoption revenue.

What would you say to someone who’s concerned that people who want free pets are going to be subpar pet owners?

We know there’s no bearing on [a fee-waived pet] being mistreated or being loved any less, but I have seen shelters say, “Our returns do go up [when we waive fees].” But it’s not because of the adopters, it’s because you’ve lowered a barrier on an animal who needed it, and you got him out! And that’s great that you got a return, because it means you got an adoption, and you got him out.

Even if your return rate is higher for fee-waived adoptions, it’s because those dogs were more likely to be returned anyway. And you need to get a couple of returns under their belts to get them into a home that’s a good fit.

–Emily Fromm, Chief Development Officer