Page 44 - BusinessWest July 10, 2023

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Founder and CEO Sheryl Blancato.
44 JULY 10, 2023
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No Place Like Home
Second Chance Animal Services Improves Lives of Pets — and People
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
It’s called Homebound to the Rescue.
The idea behind this initiative, one of many launched over the years by Second Chance Animal Services, is
that many senior citizens can’t afford to provide basic
medical care for their pets or don’t have transportation to bring them to a vet.
What Second Chance does is bring care to the pet owner’s doorstep by visiting low-income senior-housing areas to offer low-cost vaccinations, testing, and other care, so the animals stay healthy and, just as important, don’t have to be surrendered because they can’t be properly cared
for.Then there’s Project Keep Me, which provides temporary housing for the pets of domestic-violence survivors, enabling their owners to seek safe housing arrangements while ensuring the well-being of their animal companions, and later returning them to a more stable environment. Without such a program, people in crisis often have to choose between staying in a dangerous situation and losing their beloved pets.
“Maybe your sister can temporarily house you, but she’s got dogs, and you have cats, and the dogs don’t like cats, so you have to find a place for your cats,” said Sheryl Blancato, founder and CEO of Second Chance. “So we’ll take the cats, up to 90 days. It’s a wonderful experience to be able to get those people out. We hope that shelters take the animals as well, but not all shelters do. They just need that transition time, and we need to get them out of that dangerous situation.”
“Keeping families and pets together” is a slogan found on many of Second Chance’s brochures, and for good reason: it’s at the heart of what Blancato and her team do.
Simply put, she founded the organization in 1999 primarily to find homes for homeless animals, but later began providing low-cost medical care and vaccinations, realizing that healthy animals are less likely to be surrendered. And many of the programs that have followed have been with the same goal in mind: not only to help animals find homes, but keep as many as possible from being surrendered at all.
“Our main focus is what we call surrender prevention. If they have a loving home, we want to keep them there, if at all possible,” Blancato said in describing why programs like Homebound are so important. “For those that are on Social Security, retired, on a fixed income, those pets are often their sole daily companion. They’re vital to the health of the senior as well. They provide companionship, they keep your