We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dara Eckart a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Dara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How has Covid changed your business model?
During the initial wave of COVID in 2020, we were under the safer at home orders for Pinellas County. We had to close down the shelter due to the requirement for remote work so we put a call out to our community to help us get all of our animals adopted or fostered so that we could operate with a skeleton crew at the shelter. Once all of the animals were out of the shelter, we weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves with no animals to care for. So we brainstormed a way to help our community through this unprecedented event. We created the Safer at Home fund that provided vouchers to those in our community who were struggling financially due to COVID. The vouchers helped people keep their pets at home where they belonged by providing free food, litter, spay/neuter/vaccination, flea & tick medicine and heartworm preventative. We were able to help more than 1400 families keep their pets healthy at at home.
We are back to normal operations at the shelter now, but we realize that our community needs our support still, so we are seeking out opportunities to be the go to resource for our community when they find themselves in need. We have a partnership with the St. Pete Free Clinic to provide free dog and cat food to those in need. We also do a couple of free vaccination clinics each year. We are working on expanding our human/animal support services over the coming years to further help Pinellas County residents keep their pets at home so they don’t end up in a shelter environment.
Dara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I spent the majority of my career in higher education at Indiana University where I held several roles mostly in alumni relations and fundraising. My last stint at IU was as the Administrative Director for two cybersecurity related centers. My husband and I decided to move to Florida in 2015 after I received an offer from USF. My goal, however, was to find an opportunity to lead a non-profit organization after we got settled in Florida. To my great surprise, the executive director position for Friends of Strays opened and it turned out to be a great fit for me. With my background in leadership, grant writing and management, budgeting, and strategic planning, I was able to show the Friends of Strays Board that I had the skills necessary to take this organization to the next level.
I fell in love with the organization while I was going through the interview process and knew that I could make a positive impact here if given the chance. Since I was hired, we have more than tripled our adoption numbers annually, created new foster and volunteer programs to get the community involved in helping us care for our animals, and created outward facing programs to support our beloved community in St. Pete and Pinellas County.
We are growing rapidly and have plans for expansion of our physical space over the next few years. After spending more than 40 years in our current space and the growth that we’ve experienced over the last five years, we have completely outgrown our current shelter. We have plans for separate cat and dog adoption buildings and will expand our current building to be the medical and intake hub. We’re excited that we will become an even greater resource for our community through this expansion.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When the pandemic started in 2020, we had to close our doors for two months during the initial lockdown phase. We were thrilled that many of our community members helped us out by adopting and fostering animals so that we could clear our our shelter. With no animals in the shelter, however, we were left feeling a bit adrift. It was at this time that we really started to think about how Friends of Strays could and should be a resource for those in need. We created the Safer at Home fund that focused on helping our community through this unprecedented time and had our biggest one day fundraiser to date raising more than $40,000. These funds were used in a program that provided vouchers to folks who were financially impacted by the pandemic so that they could provide for their pets instead of having to make a horrible choice of giving up their pets. These vouchers covered veterinary expenses like spay/neuter surgery, flea and heartworm preventatives, and vaccinations as well as cat and dog food, treats, and cat litter. In all we were able to help keep more than 3000 animals at home with their families where they belong.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
When I took over as executive director of Friends of Strays, we did not have the best reputation in the community. After years lacking strong leadership, Friends of Strays was literally the last place anyone thought to adopt an animal from in Pinellas County. I read the google and facebook reviews and realized that we had a serious reputation problem that needed to be addressed before we could start doing good things for our community.
Our shelter at the time was over capacity with the number of animals we had awaiting adoption, we didn’t have a strong medical team so the animals we had weren’t receiving the best care, and our customer service was lacking. The first few things we did after I started included working with staff to ensure a good customer experience, beefing up the medical team so that we had medical coverage 7 days a week, and reducing the number of animals in the shelter. We were fortunate to have an anonymous donor who covered all adoption fees for cats for an entire month not long after I started. That month, we adopted out more than 130 cats, which reduced the number of cats in our shelter to a more manageable number. When cats are overcrowded in a shelter, they tend to be overly stressed which causes health issues such as upper respiratory infections and ringworm outbreaks, both leading to longer length of stay and poor outcomes for the cats. We also made some very basic changes to the shelter like painting, changing the flooring, and installing new lighting throughout the shelter to make it more welcoming to visitors and adopters. These simple, but effective strategies helped to improve our reputation in the community and, more importantly, helped to find loving homes for animals who had been living in our shelter for months and in many cases years.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.friendsofstrays.org
- Instagram: friendsofstrays
- Facebook: FriendsofStraysAnimalShelter
- Linkedin: Friends of Strays Animal Shelter
- Twitter: friendsofstrays
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkjsJyCzi1ghlu-siEInRDA