From the Maddies Fund Re LAAS Transparency

Of the 5200 plus animal control departments in the US and the thousands more humane societies, SPCA, and animal welfare organizations only five met the Maddie's Foundation's expectations for "transparency". See attached letter from Richard Avanzino, CEO of Maddie's Foundation:


At this time, transparency is not prevalent. But, here are examples of organizations headed in that direction:

• Los Angeles Animal Services (There is a statistics link on the hompage at
http://www.laanimalservices.com/.)

• The Dane County Humane Society (http://giveshelter.org/about/stats/)

• The Tompkins County SPCA (Click on http://www.spcaonline.com/sp_newlink.htm
and scroll to "How'd We Do Last Year.")

• The Humane Society of Boulder Valley (http://www.boulderhumane.org/gen/faq.html)

• The Richmond SPCA
(http://www.richmondspca.org/site/DocServer/february_06.doc?docID=1403)

You can also go to the Maddie’s Fund website (www.maddiesfund.org/projects/index.html).
We publish statistics of our funded projects on-line and in our Annual Report.

To further encourage transparency, Maddie’s Fund has established a series of new grants
(http://www.maddiesfund.org/grant/starter_grants_index.html) that reward organizations for gathering and publishing their statistics.

And, in conjunction with other national organizations, we are working on the creation of a central website that will host statistical data gathered from animal welfare organizations around the country.

We are hopeful that the Asilomar Accords (http://www.maddiesfund.org/organizations/asilomar.html)
will be a significant factor in stimulating transparency. The ninth Guiding Principle of the Accords states: “We believe in the importance of transparency and the open sharing of accurate, complete animal-sheltering data and statistics in a manner which is clear to both the animal welfare community and the public.”

Clearly, we are not yet at a point where transparency is the norm among animal welfare organizations. But because we believe this practice will ultimately help save more lives, we hope, for the animals' sake, that many organizations will see the true merit of moving in this direction, and that transparency does indeed become commonplace in the very near future.


Sincerely,


Rich Avanzino
CEO, Maddies Fund