We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gabe Horton a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gabe, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Pawster Nashville was born in the summer of 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As news of the pandemic’s economic consequences filled the headlines, a group of Nashville residents began to wonder how an economic downturn might affect pet owners. With rising unemployment, housing instability, evictions, and lack of access to usual services, what options did pet owners have?

So we asked around.

Nashville has a strong community of animal welfare organizations, and we wanted to know what they were already doing. We learned that Nashville has a great infrastructure for free and discounted veterinary care, pet food banks, and behavior training for pets. There is even a group of different organizations who work together to help Nashville’s cats and dogs, called the SAFE Coalition. Nashville cares about its pets.

But there was a missing piece:

Short-term foster care when pet owners are in crisis.

We learned that when pet owners are unable to care for their pets temporarily, they don’t have many options other than surrendering their pet to a shelter or rescue. When someone decides to leave a domestic violence situation, what happens to their pet? When the landlord evicts them and they can’t find pet-friendly housing, what are they supposed to do? What happens to their dog when they end up in the hospital for weeks or months?

Nashville needed a new organization to focus exclusively on helping pets and owners stay together through crisis. By placing cats and dogs in loving foster homes until the pet’s owner is back on their feet, we could give pet owners an alternative to surrendering their pets.

As soon as I heard this, the message resonated with me. My neighbor had recently surrendered his dog, Lacy, due to temporary medical issues. There was no reason why someone with a temporary crisis should have to surrender their pet permanently. If we could do something to help people like Lacy’s owner, then we figured… let’s do it!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I came to Pawster Nashville from the “people” side of nonprofits. Pawster provides Crisis Foster Care for dogs and cats when their owners are temporarily unable to care for them. This solves two problems: First, Crisis Foster Care keeps pets from being surrendered and ending up in the shelter. But even more importantly, it keeps families together. We know that pets are integral parts of their families. Without them, people in crisis would face even more difficulty landing on their feet. By working to keep pets and people together, Pawster helps pets and their people.

I am proud that Pawster has been able to foster even more pets in our first two years than we originally planned. But we are still only able to meet a portion of the need for Crisis Foster Care in Middle Tennessee. We continue to build capacity so that we can help every pet and person in need.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Starting a brand new nonprofit at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic may have raised some eyebrows. After all, there was so much uncertainty regarding the economy, the pandemic, and what the next few years would hold. But it was also the perfect time to take a chance on an important mission. If it failed, then so be it – this was the perfect time to take a leap. And if we could make it through the first years of uncertainty, then we would be better positioned to continue building, given that we were born in a time that required flexibility and a willingness to adapt to unexpected changes.

That said, we had much more success fundraising to start the organization than we originally anticipated. We started fundraising for a trial program in September 2020. Our goal was to raise $10,000 by the end of the year. We raised $16,000 and were able to open our doors and hit the ground running in 2021.

As a nonprofit, Pawster relies entirely on individual donations and grants to fund our mission. We have been blown away by the amount of support from individual donors giving less than $100. We have also been so fortunate to receive several large grants that have given us the boost necessary to get through our first two years.

Our focus now is on connecting with people who have the capacity to give larger, sustainable gifts to help Pawster expand capacity and meet the overwhelming need. These gifts of $1,000 and more are transformational in the life of a young nonprofit. As we work to build relationships with people who are passionate about helping people and their pets and have the capability to give transformational gifts, we also continue to work on building ongoing relationships with corporations through both corporate sponsorship programs and grants.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I was working full-time when we started Pawster. Actually, I was on furlough for two months in March of 2020 when we first started dreaming it up. We filed articles of incorporation on May 25, 2020, and I started back to my full-time job the very next day. For the rest of 2020, I continued working full-time while working on a volunteer basis with our board of directors to plan Pawster’s launch. In early 2021, I dropped down to part-time so I could give more attention to running the day-to-day operations of Pawster. Finally, in July 2021, over a year after beginning the organization, I was able to quit my full-time job and be the first full-time paid staff member of Pawster Nashville.

The best advice I received while trying to decide how to transition from my full-time career to the “side-hustle” of Pawster came from a friend of mine who had founded a successful nonprofit over a decade earlier. She told me that she didn’t get a paycheck the entire first year of their organization. “But nothing will motivate you to raise money more than knowing your paycheck depends on it,” she told me.

That was the nudge I needed to take the leap and drop to part-time. I wasn’t willing to go completely without a paycheck, but with my wife’s salary we did the math and decided we could make it on my part-time paycheck until Pawster was able to pay me full-time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pawsternashville.org
• Instagram: @PawsterNash
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/pawsternash
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pawsternash/
• Twitter: @PawsterNash
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ60ST2oyAIkaBnfNdJI2RQ