NEWS & EVENTS

The Maddie's Fund^® mission is to revolutionize the status and wellbeing 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 first step is to help create programs that guarantee loving homes for all healthy shelter dogs and cats throughout the country. The next step is to save the sick, injured and poorly behaved pets in animal shelters nationwide.

PeopleSoft and Workday Founder, Dave Duffield and his wife, Cheryl, created Maddie's Fund. 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 companionship and love. Maddie passed away in 1997, but thanks to this one little dog, abandoned shelter animals have new opportunities to find loving homes in which they, too, may share in the joy and love that Dave and Cheryl enjoyed with Maddie.

Maddie's Fund supports collaborative efforts in which entire cities and counties pool their talents and resources to build a safety net of care for the community's dogs and cats. The foundation awards millions of dollars through multi-year grants to animal welfare coalitions to end the killing of healthy and treatable shelter dogs and cats community-wide. Funded projects must produce an immediate and measurable increase in adoptions and reduction in shelter deaths to demonstrate progress towards the goal. Starter Grants for gathering shelter statistics and writing business plans are available as precursors to community collaborative grants.

Maddie's Fund also looks to the veterinary community to help achieve the no-kill nation goal. Private practice veterinarians are encouraged to participate in Maddie-supported low-income spay/neuter programs to help reduce the numbers of unwanted pets entering animal shelters.

In addition, 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 save all healthy and treatable shelter pets nationwide.

Maddie's Fund provides special grants to selected leaders who have demonstrated the ability to create change and to save lives; to pilot programs that promise new lifesaving methods; to spay/neuter programs that target problem populations; to organizations and communities that are leading the way in achieving lifesaving goals; and to adoption guarantee shelters that are interested in obtaining new medical equipment.

Grantmaking efforts will continue to focus on organizations that honor the foundation's core values of honesty, integrity and mutual respect.