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Reducing racism in animal welfare starts with two moves made together: examine how your own organization is built, and change how it relates to the communities around it. That is the core answer in a June 23, 2020 editorial by Liz Finch for Best Friends Animal Society, based on interviews with eight Best Friends staff members who are African American, Hispanic, Native American and mixed-race.
This guide turns their recommendations into a working sequence for shelters, rescues and the people who volunteer or adopt through them. It reflects a small set of staff perspectives from one national organization, not a measured, sector-wide study, so treat the steps as informed proposals to test locally rather than proven fixes.
Step 1: Assess your organization and your community
José Ocaño, Best Friends’ senior director of culture and talent, puts the starting point plainly: “Organizations need to know where they’re at today to be able to set goals around diversity, equity and inclusion.” Without a baseline, goals are guesses.
The editorial suggests a set of questions any shelter or rescue can answer internally:
#1 Best Overall
- Whom do we serve, and who lives in the surrounding area?
- Who is on our staff and board, and does that resemble the community?
- What programs do we offer, and does our mission fit what local people actually need?
- Who uses our adoption services, and who is missing?
The last question matters most. Absence is easy to overlook because the people who never come through the door do not show up in your records.
Step 2: Review hiring, volunteering and advancement
The contributors question requirements that may not add value to the work, such as a specific education level or a blanket exclusion of people with nonviolent criminal histories. These are their proposals, not universal HR rules, and each organization has to weigh them against its own legal and safety obligations. Their suggestions fall into three groups:
- Criteria: ask of each requirement whether it predicts good performance in the role, or merely screens people out.
- Recruitment: recruit actively rather than waiting for applicants who already know the field.
- Advancement: build pathways so people of color can move into leadership, not just entry-level or volunteer roles.
Step 3: Remove barriers to participation and services
Contributors point to several practical barriers that can quietly keep people away:
- Language: whether outreach, adoption paperwork and staff can serve people in the languages the community speaks.
- Location: where outreach and adoption events are held, and who feels welcome there.
- Assumptions: judgments about income or pet care that lead staff to screen people out before a conversation starts.
The shift they ask for is one of default posture: look for reasons to welcome and support more people rather than reasons to exclude them.
Step 4: Rethink the story you tell about pet homelessness
Ocaño also says: “How you think about a problem and what you deem is the problem will inform the solution.” If an organization’s narrative is that people in some neighborhoods simply do not care, its programs will be built around correcting those people. The contributors instead point to housing, education and socioeconomic disparities, and ask organizations to understand how history and personal experience shape views on breeding and spay/neuter.
These are the interviewees’ analysis and testimony. The editorial gives no figures or studies that quantify these causes, so use them as prompts for listening, not as conclusions to cite as established fact.
Rank #3
Language matters here too. Akisha Townsend-Eaton, a legislative attorney, says: “We need to focus more on the ‘us’ as a collective community rather than ‘those’ communities over there, and consider what it means to say we are ‘collaborating’ with people instead of ‘reaching out’ to them.”
Step 5: Recognize the support that already exists
Contributors describe informal fostering and rehoming within their own communities: neighbors and relatives taking in animals without any shelter involvement. That is existing care, even if it never appears in intake statistics. They also suggest reconsidering how assistance such as spay/neuter vouchers is framed, so help reads as support offered between equals rather than charity delivered to a deficit.
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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteJames Evans, president of Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity (CARE), is quoted as saying that “only through love of humanity will we be able to meet people with curiosity and not riddled with judgment and biases.”
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Step 6: Speak up when discrimination happens
The editorial’s final recommendation is not to stay silent. Dinah Sepulveda, community cat programs coordinator, says: “If someone is comfortable enough to say something ugly and hateful, you have to be comfortable enough to dive into that uncomfortable situation.” In practice that means colleagues, volunteers and leaders respond when they witness racism, rather than leaving the target to handle it alone.
A simple way to compare approaches
The editorial does not rank programs, but its recommendations suggest five questions for judging any initiative, whether your own or a vendor’s workshop. This is a synthesis of the article, not a validated scoring system.
| Question | What a strong answer looks like |
|---|---|
| Does it start from local needs? | Begins with who actually lives nearby and what they ask for |
| Does it change hiring and advancement? | Requirements are reviewed; leadership pathways exist |
| Does it remove barriers? | Language, location, income assumptions are addressed |
| Does it include community perspectives? | Existing informal support is recognized; people are collaborators |
| Is there follow-through? | A clear response when discrimination occurs |
Further learning
Best Friends’ diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging resource page lists related materials, including “Moving Beyond Bias with CARE,” a Culture Initiatives Playbook, a town hall on barriers, and a course on implementing social change with volunteers. Their current availability and cost are not established here, so check the page directly.
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What this does and does not show
The editorial contains no prevalence figures, studies or measured outcomes, and this article adds none. It is eight people’s experience and recommendations from 2020. Your community, and the people you have not yet heard from, are the better evidence for what to change next.
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