From our colleagues at the Florida Animal Control Association (FACA):
FACA is working to support HB 157 by Representative Jeff Holcomb and SB 518 by Senator Nick DiCeglie. These bills would protect the contact information of citizens who adopt animals from city and county animal shelters. Today, Florida law requires the release of this information to anyone who asks for it.
As COVID cases continue to rise in Florida, many organizations are seeking to rethink their workplace safety guidelines and protocols. Leaders are grappling with decisions about mask mandates, vaccination requirements, and how they can best protect employees and the public they serve. Below are some resources that my help as you navigate changes in your organizations policies.
Animal shelters do not often have the opportunity to commit to a major renovation or new building project. So, the decision to start fresh with a new facility or to transform your current space needs to be thoughtfully considered based on a variety of factors, including fundraising capability, site availability, and animal capacity needs now, and at minimum, a decade into the future.
Understanding your fundraising capacity is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You cannot properly evaluate fundraising capacity without some analysis of your current and future needs. However, you won’t be able to fully define the scope of the project until you know how much money you can raise. We recommend a needs assessment to understand how much it would cost to design and build the project if you were to undertake a major renovation or potentially build a whole new shelter. With this information, your fundraising feasibility consultant can do his or her work more effectively.
With increasing number of natural disasters, there is a need for effective and efficient ways to manage the number of animal transfer to and from your organization. As evidence with California fires or the hurricanes in Louisianna this past year, more and more transfer networks are being created to help get animals quickly out of harms way.
That’s whyPetPoint, in coordination with Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), have built the all-new Transfer Manifest Report — a report designed to make transferring animals, even in emergencies, easier than ever before. Display the animals ready for transfer, along with their vital medical details and behavior status, in a report that opens in Excel for easy sharing or sorting.
Courtesy of Pensacola Humane Society
COVID-19 drastically changed how animal shelters operated around the country. As state stay-home mandates went into effect many shelters, Pensacola Humane Society included, scrambled to figure out how to keep animals safe and cared for while maneuvering the ever-changing rules and regulations that the global pandemic brought. One of the positive things to come out of it all was the way it brought together animal shelters around the nation with regular zoom calls keeping people in the loop, offering advice and being a sounding board as we all tried to make the best decisions. Another positive that came out of all the changes caused by COVID-19 was the forming of our Help Team. The Help Team was created to offer support, advice and help to the community of Pensacola by way of phone calls and emails, regularly communicating with the community remotely.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on your activities, the Board of Directors of FL Animal Friend has extended the deadline for completion of your project and your report.
Instead of filing no later than September 1, your final report is now due no later than 5 PM on November 1, 2020.
Florida law enforcement officers are lending their support for legislation to include pets in domestic violence temporary restraining orders (SB 1082/HB241). In a video posted on the ASPCA's Facebook page, Florida law enforcement officers and State Representative Sam Killebrew urge Floridians to join them in supporting the bill.
The legislation has already passed the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee and the Senate Agriculture Committee. It still must be reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary and Rules committees.
