Total Grants to Date: $15,490,797.30 (since 2000)

For over twenty years, Maddie’s Fund^® has partnered with Best Friends Animal Society to provide support for their No More Homeless Pets Utah program, sponsorship for and scholarships to their national conferences, the California Animal Welfare Funders Collaborative and funding to transform shelters into community resource centers, including their Shelter Embed Project.

Shelter Embed Project

In May 2019, Maddie’s Fund awarded Best Friends with an 18-month $1.5M grant to support Maddie’s Shelter Embed Program. This project helps shelters improve operations and properly resource communities to increase positive outcomes and create sustainable operations by placing Best Friends’ team members at their partner shelter locations working hand in hand with the shelter staff. Our funding provided embed staff at Palm Valley Animal Society and Humane Society of Harlingen in Texas, and Santa Rosa County Animal Services in Florida, collectively known as Maddie's^® Shelter Embed Program. The original goal for this project was to save 12,000 lives; from June 2019 to December 2020, 28,001 dogs and cats were saved through this project.

In May 2021, Maddie’s Fund^® provided a $1.4M grant to help expand the Shelter Embed Program to additional shelters across the country, resulting in twenty-five new partner agencies saving 13,336 dogs and cats. This was followed by a $3M grant in May 2022, which will support the program through 2025. As of May 2024, thirteen more shelters have completed the program, five have current partnerships and six are pending as potential partners. Shelters that partner with Best Friends though the Shelter Embed Program continue to consistently increase their save rates and reduce the number of animals killed at their facilities at twice the rate of other shelters.