"We have a volunteer coordinator who is unfortunately a volunteer": a qualitative assessment of animal shelters

Abstract

Animal shelter and rescue facilities in the United States provide a vital service to over 6 million animals in dire need each year. Unfortunately, these facilities are running on limited resources and will need to adjust to accommodate the number of growing homeless animals in the coming years. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals from different parts of the adoption process ranging from adopters to shelter administrators to gain insight into areas of improvement as well as to understand the current needs of these facilities. We found that volunteer and shelter management, awareness and communication of shelter needs, and fundraising and facilitating adoption were the prominent areas that need attention. From this, we discuss implications for design of future technological solutions that could address these needs.