Today we’d like to introduce you to Stray Paws Animal Haven. Them and their team share their story with us below:
After being in the animal advocacy field for years co-founders Melissa Bento and Joe Federico decided to bring resources for spay and neuter specifically Trap Neuter Return, or TNR, further east where the availability was nearly non-existent. Choosing South El Monte due to its proximity to all major freeways and cities in the East L.A. area Stray Paws quickly started to become the “go to” resource in the East LA and San Gabriel Valley region. In early 2019 when the City of El Monte transitioned animal control services from county-based patrol to city-based patrol, Stray Paws got an opportunity to work closely on creating community-based solutions to the overwhelming and minimally managed feral cat colony population that was present in the region. Stray Paws provided education, resources and transport to spay/neuter clinics for people who where willing to take on the task of managing and helping reduce the overpopulation of feral and community cats. Stray Paws was able to help the city of El Monte virtually eliminate shelter impounds of Community and Feral cats through building a culture of TNR friendly education by El Monte Animal Control officers in the field. Stray Paws also worked hard through outreach to build education and resources in the community as a long-term solution. Stray Paws has been able to be a resource for 15 surrounding cities and is now working to secure partnerships similar the one they have developed with EL Monte with other cities. We have always been an organization based on education and outreach vs service and enforcement. We continue to grow and become a bigger name in the Animal Advocacy world. We hope to bring our mission to more and more regions to eventually create a TNR culture in all of the communities we service.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
From the beginning, it has been a challenging to get the ball rolling. We had a lot of support, however as we where gaining momentum with many projects that would have brought us funding and more support to expand our operation, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. This forced us to temporarily halt our operations and when we where able to open back up, the clinical support we counted on to get the spay/neuter surgeries that are essential to our work were gone or temporarily suspended. We also had to rethink some of the projects we had to expand our clinical capacity due to availability. As most everyone did, we had to find a way to ensure we could continue our Trapper (customer) facing operations in a way that was covid safe for both our staff and our trappers. We are finally gaining traction again and have started revisiting some of our projects that where on hold and although slowly, are expanding operation for next year.
We’ve been impressed with Stray Paws Animal Haven, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We are a TNR focused organization with a goal to fix them all. Our main focus is to bring resources and educate local communities about the importance of managing stray/feral cat colonies through Trap Neuter Return. We currently service seven different cities in LA county and in the near future look to expand our services with the launch of our mobile spay/neuter clinic. We have a trap depot of over 200 humane traps to loan in our service area free of charge for assistance in the Trap Neuter Return process. We also provide free education for communities about TNR including info sessions, printed material and one on one coaching. We provide emergency medical resources and services for cats that are found injured in the field while TNRing. We help provide resources for neonatal kittens and have a youth education program focused on educating school aged children about TNR, Kitten care, Fostering and Rescue. Our biggest asset and what really sets us apart is the ability to build relationships with the communities and community members we service. We treat everyone like family and strive to ensure that the community members see us as allies in their community not just a place that provides a service. Our goal is to create as much engagement around TNR and to empower the community to create lasting results by participating as a community not just a single concerned citizen that has cat issues. There are not any groups that we know of serving at this scale of operations that can still keep the community engaged as partners. We love seeing People go from “hating all the cats in their yard” to telling all their neighbors about TNR and why it’s the best thing they can do for both the cats and the community. We are blessed to see this happen very often and it is the driving force of what keeps us all going here at Stray Paws.
What are your plans for the future?
We plan to bring TNR resources to more and more communities. Specially to areas where there are little to no TNR resources available now. One of the ways we plan to do this is through our very own Fleet of Mobile Spay/Neuter clinics. We are currently working on the launch of our very first Mobile Unit in the early part of 2022. This clinic will travel providing spay/neuter services for rescues and members of the community that participates in TNR. We hope to have several of these units built. The hope is that once the first unit is built and successful, more capable donors will be willing to invest in additional units to bring this type of help to all the underserved communities that so desperately need it. We as always, continue to search for more clinic partners that are willing to help increase our spay/neuter capacity so that we can create a greater impact and help more communities.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.StrayPawsAnimalHaven.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/straypawsanimalhaven
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StrayPawsAnimalHaven/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/tnrstrong
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmbFSqiQo_f1eKTcXxdDJKA/about
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/stray-paws-animal-haven-south-el-monte-2
- Other: https://linktr.ee/straypawsanimalhaven
Image Credits:
Christian I Solis Photography
