Lynchburg Humane Society Blog

As an organization we view ourselves as a for purpose organization or business.    We are always    striving to find ways of improving our business model and continuously look to other industries to benchmark I recently read “The Google Way” and a few articles on the Amazon and Zappos business models regarding managing a team and setting up a successful business structure.   As we transition to the next phase for our organization in our new Center for Pets, we felt that it was important to begin structuring ourselves more like a business, while still maintaining our mission . Thus, our journey to set up the Lynchburg Humane Society as a purpose driven organization began. With all of this in mind, we decided our first step was to create core values for the organization. The new core values, as with any business, will guide us in our day to day operations and in our staffing decisions to better serve the community and the pets in our care. We would like to share with yo

Recently, a small group of us brainstormed about our “slogan” or catch phrase for the organization.  Our old catch phrase was “Giving animals a second chance” which was a great statement for our push to become no kill.  But now that the new facility is opening and we have achieved that goal we needed something else.   We considered using our Capital Campaign slogan of “It’s about the pets” but honestly, so much of what we do relates to people and helping them that it isn’t just about the pets.  That is when one member of the committee said “Find Happiness”.  And we all stopped and said, 2014 was an exciting year for us.  We helped 2,359 pets at our old facility.  Of those, 1,741 were adopted and 276 were returned back to their owners so we helped over 2,000 pets find happiness.  This equates to a 94% save rate, the highest since we started down this path to No Kill. Our mission is to continue to save more pets in our community and the surrounding counties. We hope to be a resour