For the first time in hours, Patricia Starkey is giggling. The 69-year-old widow is kneeling on the floor, inviting her dog to offer a high five. “Come on, Sassy!” she murmurs. “You can do it!” Sassy, a squat terrier with a few teeth missing, takes a moment to get in the mood. Then the dog’s right front paw rises high. Voila! — owner and dog enjoy a happy hand slap.
Starkey and Sassy have stayed together for 12 years, despite many hardships, thanks in large part to a philanthropic redirection by Maddie’s Fund, a $260 million foundation that focuses on animal welfare.
“Years ago, we really focused on the pet — and the pet only,” explains Maddie’s board chair, Amy Zeifang. “I feel I was guilty of this. And now, we’ve shifted our thinking to the pet and the person’” — including economically vulnerable pet owners like Starkey, whose entire budget is based on a $963 monthly check from Social Security.
All told, 20 million U.S. pets live in poverty with their owners, according to a recent Harris Poll conducted for the Humane Society of the United States. For these owners, veterinary bills are daunting. Finding homes that allow pets is tough, too. Even a brief housing crisis can force an owner to surrender their dog or cat. Finances are so tight, the Harris Poll found, that 43 percent of the owners surveyed have sometimes been unable to pay for their pets’ needs.
Mindful of these challenges, “we’re doing a lot more work with the intersection of human services,” Zeifang says. Today, more than half of Maddie’s grant portfolio relates to pet owners’ predicaments. This strategy switch at Maddie’s Fund isn’t just a critical turning point for the 30-year-old philanthropy. It also is a high-profile test of what happens in many social sectors — from health care to housing — when foundations refocus their efforts on what they hope are the neglected early causes of problems, rather than the often-tragic symptoms.
With its offices in Pleasanton, Calif., just a few miles east of Silicon Valley’s tech hub, Maddie’s pursues a grant-making strategy that invites comparison to venture capital. Testing a wide range of ideas at once, Maddie’s often supports multi-site projects with grants of about $200,000 to $1.5 million apiece. Recipients explore everything from the value of short-term foster pet care to the challenges that people of color can face with their pets.
One Maddie’s grantee, AlignCare Health, provides pet owners in need with an unusual, no-premium form of subsidized care coverage, requiring only 20 percent copays. Patricia Starkey, the Knoxville widow, benefited when her dog needed a full regimen of anti-flea medicine that ordinarily would have cost more than $100. With AlignCare, it cost only about $25. AlignCare also introduced her to a vet who removed a benign tumor from her dog for free. “I’m not sure I could have paid for that myself,” Starkey says.
Giving Back to Man’s Best Friend
The creation of Maddie’s Fund dates back to the 1990s, when Dave Duffield, founder of the hugely successful business-software company PeopleSoft, pledged $200 million to support animal welfare. He and his wife, Cheryl, announced this in memory of Maddie, the family’s late miniature schnauzer.
“I absolutely fell in love with that little dog,” Dave Duffield told the San Francisco Examiner in 1998. “I told Cheryl that if we ever get money some day, we’re going to give it back to [animal groups] for all the love Maddie gave us.”
The Duffields’ foundation started with a simple mission: ending animal shelters’ routine euthanasia of millions of adoptable dogs and cats in the United States. Embracing a no-kill strategy was controversial at the time, but Duffield was adamant about the power of his approach. Duffield recruited the former head of San Francisco’s Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Rich Avanzino, to be the foundation’s first executive director. His daughter Amy became chair of Maddie’s Fund; other children have taken on leadership roles as well.
Over the next decade, that tight focus on reducing America’s animal euthanasia rate paid off. In 2002-03, Alabama’s euthanasia rate dropped 9 percent after a $2.5 million Maddie’s grant paid for 36,000 dogs and cats to be spayed. Other grants brought even bigger reductions, Year by year, Maddie’s funded more neutering campaigns. The foundation also worked with many other animal-rescue organizations on public messaging urging people to adopt rescue animals, rather than buying pets from breeders.
“We are close to becoming a no-kill nation,” Maddie’s Fund declared in its 2014 annual report. Humane societies, animal shelters, advocates such as Nathan Winograd, and other pet-related philanthropies banded together to reduce national rates of animal euthanasia. With Maddie’s Fund playing an important, often collaborative, role in this push, the U.S. euthanasia rate dropped to just 3 million a year, from a peak of 20 million in 1970, according to the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Maddie’s Fund, a champion of rigorous data-collection, found drops as large as 90 percent in the euthanasia rates at its animal-shelter grantees. Data fluency has been a way of life at the foundation, executive leader Mary Ippoliti-Smith says. That’s partly because many Maddie’s employees honed their skills earlier at Duffield’s software companies. It also reflects Maddie’s insistence that grantees use up-to-date software to achieve precise tracking of animal outcomes. “You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are,” Ippoliti-Smith observes.
From 2015 onward, Maddie’s Fund began exploring new ways to have impact. It launched an online project, Maddie’s University, that generated free digital teaching materials for shelter leaders and volunteers. The foundation also awarded at least 100 modest-sized leadership grants — averaging $70,000 — to veterinarians, academic researchers, and others with interesting ideas.
“We’re self-funded,” Zeifang says, “so we’re able to take more chances than many other funders,” which need to raise fresh operating revenue from outside donors every year. By contrast, Maddie’s generates as much as $15 million annually of investment income from its existing portfolio. It also has received at least $100 million in supplemental funds from Duffield since its founding. His success with a second software startup, Workday, has boosted his fortune to more than $12 billion, Forbes estimates.
With such financial resources, Zeifang says, “We can support early-stage ideas and people who have really new ways of thinking. Oftentimes these work out. Not all the time.”
A Safety Net of Care
As Maddie’s started expanding its mission in 2018 and 2019, grantees kept nudging Maddie’s Fund executives to think about pet welfare in a wider, more holistic way. Ellen Jefferson, executive director of Austin Pets Alive, recalls a breakthrough moment at a 2019 animal-shelter leadership conference. Attendees talked about pet-companion relationships so vividly that people in the room started crying. Two Maddie’s executives were in the room — and took note. “That’s not the kind of thing you can put in a grant report,” Jefferson says.
In early 2020, the shocking disruptions of the Covid pandemic brought rapid clarity to Maddie’s next move. “Covid shone a light on how fragile some families were, because of job loss and everything shutting down,” Zeifang recalls. Did pet owners need help with transportation to vets’ offices? Should Meals on Wheels be delivering pet food to the homebound elderly, too? The case for a more comprehensive approach to pet owners’ needs felt compelling.
Maddies’ grant-making portfolio since 2021 reflects this change of thinking. On a local level, Maddie’s provides $200,000 of support to WisCARES, a Madison, Wisc., community veterinary clinic for families experiencing low income or homelessness. In San Francisco, Maddie’s is supporting the local Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in a community outreach program to understand — and fix — issues in neighborhoods where rates of animal surrenders have been high.
On a national level, Maddie’s has awarded more than $1 million in grants to Baltimore-based Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity (CARE), which focuses on the pet-ownership challenges faced by people of color. “There’s bias in everything from animal adoption to the way animal control officials give tickets to some people, but only warnings to others,” says CARE co-founder James Evans. His group’s research and advocacy seeks to repair those imbalances.
It’s been a little more than three years since Maddie’s Fund reworked its public messaging to stretch beyond its original no-kill goal for shelters. Today, a new commitment in its “About Us” section of its website talks about “keeping pets and people together, creating a safety net of care for animals in need and operating within a culture of inclusiveness and humility.”
As ambitious as these new goals are, questions remain: Can Maddie’s build enough momentum with its post-2020 grants to drive national transformation? Or are the root causes of vulnerable pet owners’ problems too big to be altered by a single foundation’s efforts?
“The current care system [for animals and people] is so siloed today — and we can do better,” says Michael Blackwell, a former dean of the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine. Since 2018, he has been a Maddie’s grantee, building AlignCare into a multi-city pilot that offers an integrated care system for pets and their families. It covers everything from pet surgeries to social-worker support as owners try to avoid homelessness.
AlignCare’s progress to date evokes both great enthusiasm and tough questions. Early users’ enthusiasm for the service has been off the charts. During a recent interview in Knoxville, AlignCare’s director of community engagement, Andy Bostick, eagerly shared heartfelt responses that plan members have sent to date.
“You helped so much with the medical bills, as we were struggling,” one user wrote. “Without your help, we wouldn’t have Lucas,” another added. From a third: “I’m on disability, and my monthly check isn’t much at all. Without AlignCare, Cookie wouldn’t be here with me.”
Yet AlignCare’s system isn’t built to scale. To make its finances work, the current program depends on subsidies from Maddie’s and other foundations. Enrollment to date — via carefully built pilots in about a dozen cities — totals only a few thousand.
“AlignCare’s potential for growth is challenged by the immediate need for funding,” Blackwell says. Current funders’ resources have limits, so expansion may hinge on the entry of deeper-pocketed government or private-sector sources. Lining up such support would stretch beyond Maddie’s usual role. “We tend not to get involved in specific policy work,” Zeifang explains.
“But we can be a catalyst,” adds Sharon Fletcher, Maddie’s head of marketing. She notes that Maddie’s worked closely with the Ad Council 20 years ago to build up the public appeal of shelter-dog ownership. More recently, Maddie’s and the Ad Council have been talking up the concept of “keeping pets and people together.”
“I’m not sure that we’ll ever completely solve access to [veterinary] care,” Zeifang says. “We can dream and hope, but we haven’t been able to do that with humans. So to be able to do that with pets is still a ways off. For me, it would be successful if we could establish a model that can be expanded nationally.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
