Paw Fund: Meeting Pets and People Where They Live

Paw Fund serves pets of people in need who come from all walks of life. photos: Jill Posener

I first became aware of the importance of companion animals in the lives of the unhoused more than 20 years ago. I had moved to the East Bay and the Albany Bulb had become a favorite place to go hiking with my dogs. We shared that park with what was, at the time, one of the largest homeless encampments in the region. 

One day I saw a man I recognized from my morning walks, tears streaming down his face, carrying his four-month-old puppy towards the parking lot from the encampment. The pup lay limp in his arms. I offered to drive the puppy to a vet and made space in the back of my truck, but he died on the way to the vet. I had to return to tell the man his puppy had died and that it had tested positive for parvo virus. The pup had never been vaccinated.

I’m not a veterinarian, and I’m terrified of needles. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that man and his puppy, and whether there was a way to get vaccines to the pets of those with few resources and no transportation to get to a vet. And that’s how, back in 2006, I first asked the manager of the local animal shelter if she would come and vaccinate the dogs and puppies out at the Bulb. 

Over the next few years, I brought any vet technician I could persuade to visit the Bulb to vaccinate and re-vaccinate the companion animals of people living there.

By late 2010, I had come up with the name Paw Fund, and I tentatively approached a friend about funding a more comprehensive effort to vaccinate puppies and kittens living in high-risk situations, which would also include offering to pay for spay and neuter surgeries if the owners were open to doing that.

In May of 2011, we ran our first vaccine clinic in People’s Park in Berkeley and provided care to 43 dogs. By the end of that year, we were running monthly vaccine clinics in a parking lot in Berkeley, open to anyone who needed free pet vaccines from Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Over the last 12 years we have only missed only two clinic dates  – right at the beginning of the pandemic - and our programs have always been free.

Today, the Paw Fund is a much bigger operation. Our cloud-based database means that, even in an outdoor encampment or someone’s backyard, we can quickly look up the vaccine history of a dog or cat on our phones. There are now over 15,000 animals in our database and more than 5,000 pet owners. We pay for the spaying or neutering of between 400 and 500 pets per year and partner with veterinarians, clinics, and emergency hospitals (our contracts with both Contra Costa County and the City of Berkeley help subsidize the cost of spay and neuter surgeries, though they don’t cover the whole cost).  

Our wonderful vets - Doctors Josie Noah, Mo Rothstein, and Ilana Strubel - see animals with a variety of medical conditions at our monthly clinics. They can often treat minor issues right there on the street or they will work with the owner to get further care. Our amazing volunteer crew includes kids who started volunteering with their parents years ago and are now heading off to college.

Paw Fund has grown, but we are as accessible as we have always been. We work  outdoors in all kinds of weather and are open to anyone from the two counties we serve. We routinely see between 100 and 150 animals at each clinic and dozens more throughout the month as our street outreach team visits encampments and under-served neighborhoods in the East Bay. We even visit individual homes when there are large numbers of under-socialized dogs who would never get vaccines, flea control, or de-wormers otherwise. All our services are free.

We have seen some pets for their entire lives - from their first vaccines to their spay or neuter surgeries, from vet visits for minor medical issues to  diagnostic tests that brought heart-wrenching news. For many pet owners, our continued presence in their lives has made us seem like family - and they are family for us as well. Because we have been there year in and year out and because we do what we say we will, the communities most in need, housed and unhoused, trust us.  

Street outreach groups like ours model our programs on harm reduction principles. We focus on what we know we can accomplish and understand what we cannot. 

We know that, just as in the containment of contagious human viruses, vaccines are the key to prevention and to herd health among companion animals. Even as we’ve grown and expanded, Paw Fund remains focused on the pets – and the people – right in front of us.