2020 in Review at BARCS
The last nine months have been an exercise in perseverance and adaptation. While the COVID crisis has forced BARCS to change our operations, one thing that never stopped was the daily influx of homeless animals coming through our doors. Being an open-admission shelter has taken on a whole new meaning for us as we continue to take in and serve animals on extremely limited staffing and resources.
Despite the many challenges we’ve faced, BARCS--a nonprofit organization in the role of an essential community service--remained open every day of 2020 for animal admissions and public programs. It was important, however, that we minimize the number of staff and volunteers in the building to be only those necessary for animal care. So, we placed a heavy focus on our community programs to make sure that the animals admitted to BARCS were those who needed us most.
Our food bank, vaccine clinics, community resource phone-line and lost and found programs were busier than ever making sure that families who lost their jobs, or otherwise in need, were able to keep their beloved pets despite the pandemic. These community-based programs were real lifesavers, keeping thousands of animals in their homes, while also reducing the number of animals in our shelter. This allowed us to reduce the staff members and volunteers occupying our building at any one time for our teams health and safety. Closing down BARCS is not an option.
In 2020, BARCS cared for 7,000 homeless cats and dogs and another 700 exotic, farm and wildlife animals. And, while it’s been a difficult year, we are proud of the accomplishments we made and the lives we saved with the help of our donors, fosters, volunteers and Greater-Baltimore community.
🐾 In early May, BARCS moved to our new shelter home in the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore City. In order to prepare for the move, we called upon the community to “clear the shelter” by adopting and fostering our animals. It was important that we find forever homes and foster homes for those animals to avoid the added stress of moving. We are so grateful to all of those who stepped up to support BARCS with such a monumental project during a pandemic.
🐾 With so many people working from home, or otherwise homebound, we gained 400 new foster families while continuously working to build a list of “on-deck” fosters, ready to help when animals come in. 1,100 (and counting) animals were cared for and adopted from those foster homes. Doing this allowed us to maintain our lifesaving outcomes by continuing adoptions outside of our shelter walls with minimal human-to-human contact. This gave us the ability to refocus our sheltering efforts on emergency and specialized cases that need immediate care within our facility.
🐾 Our adoptions program switched over to a very-successful virtual adoption system for animals in the shelter. Potential adopters identified a dog or cat they were interested in meeting online through their bio and photo and then scheduled an appointment to come meet them. This helped us from having large crowds at the shelter. Video calls with foster animals allowed interested adopters to get to “meet” the animals first and ask lots of questions before adopting.
🐾 Our Franky Fund Program remained very busy. More than 700 animals (and counting) with emergency or extraordinary medical needs were helped in 2020. We are thankful to our partnering vet clinics for continuing to help BARCS, despite many veterinary clinics being overwhelmed themselves by the pandemic.
🐾 Although we were hampered for the first few months of the pandemic by strict quarantine gathering limitations, we knew that when the time came, we would look to resume our public vaccine clinic right in our new backyard--the most impactful place we could be! We partnered with a neighborhood nonprofit serving human needs, The Transformation Center, to host the clinic and have been serving 150+ animals and families per event. With more restrictions on City gatherings this winter, we’ve even further altered our public clinic services in order to make sure animals get their booster vaccines on time.
🐾 Despite all the obstacles and changes, our lifesaving shelter programs and operations continued serving animals in need. Our medical staff continued to treat illnesses and injuries in-house and provide surgery; our animal care team continued to ensure every animal had a clean place to rest with plenty of food, water, exercise and enrichment; our behavior team continued to put together doggy play groups and work individually with dogs who needed a little extra guidance; and we continued to support community cat caretakers and trappers through our community cat program.
There are not enough words to describe how amazed and grateful we are for the dedication, compassion and generosity of the thousands of individuals and families who, despite their own personal struggles, unwaveringly helped us save lives in 2020. You have been a critical part in finding health and happy endings for thousands of pets in Baltimore.
With each uncertainty, our dedicated supporters, volunteers, adopters, staff members and community came through. Because of each of you, no animal has gone without this year.
Thank you.
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