The Rogue Valley Humane Society is excited to announce that we are one of the 2020 recipients of PEDIGREE Foundation’s $10,000 Program Development Grants.
PEDIGREE Foundation was established in 2008 to help dogs in need find loving homes. Created by Mars Petcare, the maker of PEDIGREE® food for dogs, it’s an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and supports the good work of shelters and dog rescue organizations throughout the country.
This year has been especially difficult for us. We closed in early March and had to reduce our staff numbers due to COVID-19. This affected our ability to bring in our normal amounts of dogs; compared to 2019, our total number of intakes were cut in half due to the closures and small amount of staff we had in 2020. This year also saw an increase in dogs with major behavioral problems that simply overwhelmed our staff members, which also contributed to our reduced dog intake. We are committed to doing better in 2021 and being one of the recipients of PEDIGREE Foundation’s 2020 Program Development Grant will allow us to save more lives this year.
Our plan to use these grant funds will come in two parts. Firstly, this grant will help cover the cost of hiring more dog staff members and restoring the position of Dog Coordinator back to full-time. This will help us to increase our intake numbers because we will have more hands-on deck to manage daily care, better advertise our adoptable dogs, facilitate more robust home inspections and increase adoptions.
The second way we will use this grant to benefit the animals at RVHS is to form a partnership with Roman’s Holistic Dog Training. This will allow us to conduct internal training with our dog staff members and will give them access to his expertise for our more difficult behavioral cases. We will also be building a kennel onsite with Roman where we can send our most difficult cases to receive intensive training so that scared, fractious, or aggressive dogs can unlearn problematic behaviors and be prepared for adoption into loving homes.
We are thrilled to receive the grant and excited about the work ahead to get every dog the loving home he or she deserves.
About Rogue Valley Humane Society:
The Rogue Valley Humane Society provides compassionate care for stray, unwanted, displaced, and abandoned animals and works toward ending pet overpopulation so that there will be no more homeless pets. We are committed to placing every healthy, adoptable animal in a loving lifetime home, teaching responsible pet guardianship, and maintaining community spay-neuter programs.
About Pedigree Foundation:
We believe every dog deserves a loving, forever home. PEDIGREE Foundation is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working to help end pet homelessness. Nearly 3.5 million dogs end up in shelters and rescues every year, and nearly half never find a home. The foundation was established in 2008 by Mars Petcare, maker of PEDIGREE® food for dogs, to help increase dog adoption rates. We’ve awarded more than 5,700 grants and over $9 million to U.S. shelters and rescues that help dogs in need. At PEDIGREE Foundation, we’re working toward a day when all dogs are safe, secure, cared for, fed well and loved. See how you can help: PedigreeFoundation.org
We also received a grant from the Maxine Jones Spay and Neuter Fund that goes directly towards our low cost spay and neuter voucher program. This is a much needed service for our local community to help with the cost of spays and neuters for their pets. Our voucher program often runs out of funding due to high demand and we are grateful to have more funds to direct towards this service. 
