About Maddie's Fund

The Maddie's Fund mission is to revolutionize the status and well-being of companion animals.

Maddie's Fund, the Pet Rescue Foundation (www.maddiesfund.org), is a family foundation established in 1999 to help fund the creation of a no-kill nation. The foundation's first step is to help create programs that guarantee loving homes for all healthy and treatable shelter dogs and cats throughout the country. The next step will be to save the sick, injured, and poorly behaved pets in animal shelters nationwide.

Dave Duffield, Founder and Board Chairman of the Silicon Valley-based software giant PeopleSoft, and his wife Cheryl created the foundation. The foundation makes good on a promise the Duffields made to their beloved Miniature Schnauzer, Maddie, to give back to her kind in dollars that which Maddie gave to them in friendship and love. Maddie died in 1997, but, thanks to this one little dog, millions of dogs and cats throughout the country will be given a better life.

Agencies seeking financial support from Maddie's Fund are expected to build broad-based community collaborations and create comprehensive, life-saving programs. Maddie's Fund supports collaborative efforts to encourage entire cities, counties and states to pool their talents and resources to build a safety net of care for the community's dogs and cats. "Getting animal control agencies, animal shelters, animal rescue groups, volunteer foster organizations and veterinarians talking and working together is extremely important to our long-term success," says Maddie's Fund President, Richard Avanzino.

Maddie's Fund is awarding millions of dollars through five and ten-year grants to coalitions of humane organizations across the country. Funded projects must produce an immediate and measurable increase in adoptions so they can reach their goal, to end the killing of healthy dogs and cats within five years, and end the killing of healthy and treatable dogs and cats within 10 years.

The Foundation also awards grants to coalitions to carry out community spay/neuter programs for low-income pet owners.

Maddie's Fund offers grants to colleges of veterinary medicine to establish Shelter Medicine Programs so that the specialized knowledge and skills of these institutions' faculty and students can be incorporated into the effort to achieve the no-kill nation goal.

Grant making efforts focus on organizations that honor the foundation's core values of honesty, integrity and mutual respect.