After years of overcrowded shelters, rising euthanisia rates and criticism over conditions inside the Los Angeles city animal shelters, two of the nation’s largest animal welfare organizations are betting they can help change the system — not by working around it, but from within.
The Los Angeles City Council on July 1 approved a $14.2-million partnership with The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Best Friends Animal Society that will fund 23 new positions at L.A. Animal Services and embed outside consultants inside the city department. Supporters describe it as a first-of-its-kind collaboration with one of the largest municipal shelters systems in the country.
The grant is meant to improve care at the city’s six shelters, speed adoptions and rescue placements for the roughly 50,000 animals that pass through them each year, and provide additional support for shelter staff. But it also raises a larger question: Can philanthropy help stabilize a struggling public shelter system without replacing the city’s own responsibility to fund it?
The investment comes at a pivotal moment for L.A. Animal Services, which has faced years of scrutiny over overcrowding, staffing shortages and euthanasia rates. In April, Mayor Karen Bass appointed Gabrielle Amster, a longtime animal welfare executive, as the department’s new general manager after nearly two years of instability at the top.
Animal welfare leaders say that change in leadership helped create an opening.
Brittany Thorn, executive director of Best Friends Los Angeles, said her organization has worked with L.A. Animal Services for more than a decade, supporting the department while also holding it accountable when needed.
“When you have a very close partnership like that, accountability is important and accountability is kindness,” she said Thursday. “When you see a partner who is struggling…I think it’s important to call out those things with solutions and attempt to help where you can.”
In summer 2024, Best Friends released a report criticizing conditions inside city shelters and faulting then-General Manager Staycee Dains’ leadership. That same year, it also withdrew a proposed $6 million support package after saying the city had failed to respond to repeated offers of assistance. Now, the group is joining the ASPCA in what Mayor Karen Bass called a “historic investment” in the city’s shelter system.
“What gives me confidence is knowing the people in the shelter, knowing the leadership at the city and at the department,” Thorn said. “They want this help, they are now willing to lead this change.”
The grant marks a shift in strategy. For years, nonprofits have helped by pulling animals from city shelters, funding veterinary care, recruiting foster families or supporting adoptions. This initiative goes further: The organizations will help fund city staff and place four consultants inside L.A. Animal Services to advise on shelter operations, training and animal health.
The consultants will not run the department or supervise employees, ASPCA officials said. L.A. Animal Services will retain authority over its shelters. But the outside experts will help review procedures, train staff and recommend changes over the three-year grant period.
Jesse Oldham, senior director of the ASPCA Los Angeles Initiative, said the organizations realized there was an opportunity to focus “inside the shelter system” rather than only supporting work around it.
That is part of what makes the grant special, Oldham said. The ASPCA has worked in Los Angeles since 2014, providing grants, veterinary care, spay-and-neuter services, adoption programs and kitten foster support. But this partnership is designed to strengthen the shelter system itself.
The ASPCA says it has invested more than $16 million in grants and direct services in Los Angeles over the last decade, including spaying and neutering more than 167,000 pets and shelter animals. It’s also contributing expertise in shelter medicine — a veterinary specialty focused on the health, operations and disease management of animal shelters.
The new grant, Oldham said, targets one of the most basic bottlenecks in the shelter: staffing.
She said prospective adopters sometimes walk into shelters ready to adopt, only to leave because there aren’t enough employees available to show them animals or answer their questions. Animals can also wait for spay-and-neuter surgery simply because there aren’t enough employees to move them through the system.
“What are the hurdles to getting animals out of the shelter?” Oldham said. “We realize that a lot of it was staffing.”
The grant will fund positions focused on adoption, foster care, the Citywide Cat Program–which works to reduce the population of free-roaming community cats through trapping and spay-and-neuter efforts — and shelter management. City documents say the money will also fund 19 animal care technicians, three district supervisors and a director of field operations.
In written responses to questions, Amster said Thursday that L.A. Animal Services has already begun recruiting for the new positions and expects to bring the new hires on over the next few months as the expanded programs ramp up.
She said the ASPCA and Best Friends are also recruiting four advisors who will be placed inside city shelters to help train staff, develop programs and provide expertise on animal health and safety.
Coming into the role, Amster said her priority has been building “a more sustainable foundation” for the department through stronger leadership, staff development and systems that move animals humanely through shelters and into homes more quickly.
“This funding will help accelerate that,” she said. “It brings the staffing capacity and expertise to put these priorities into place nearly immediately.”
L.A. Animal Services will be required to report annually to the council on the status of the grant program, including hiring, attrition, expenditures, training and other performance metrics. Best Friends said it will also require quarterly reporting from the city on measures such as length of stay, adoptions, transfers, spay-and-neuter timelines and euthanasia numbers.
Oldham said ASPCA officials will likewise judge the initiative by whether animals move quickly through the shelters, spend less time waiting on surgery or placement, and achieve more positive outcomes through adoption or rescue. Amster said the department will also continue tracking indicators such as length of stay, return-to-owner rates, adoptions and overall lifesaving outcomes.
The question is whether three years of private funding can produce lasting change.
The grant agreement calls for the ASPCA and Best Friends to fund the effort for three years, with L.A. Animal Services agreeing to use its best efforts to sustain key positions and programs for another three years. City budget analysts said continuing those positions beyond the grant would require future General Fund support, subject to City Council approval through the annual budget process.
Amster acknowledged that the department remains underfunded and understaffed, but said the grant gives L.A. Animal Services “an opportunity to demonstrate its capabilities”’ and show how additional staffing can improve lifesaving efforts.
The City Council ultimately approved a roughly $30.8 million operating budget for L.A. Animal Services for the 2026-27 fiscal year, restoring funding above Mayor Karen Bass’ initial proposal of about $29 million. But several people interviewed for this story, including Amster, council members and nonprofit leaders, said the department remains underfunded given the size of the city’s six-shelter system.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield noted that the department’s overall cost is higher once salaries, benefits and other personnel costs are fully accounted for, estimating the total at closer to $42 million. Blumenfield said the grant is intended to launch improvements that, if they prove effective, the city should continue funding after the philanthropic support ends.
Blumenfield, who has pushed for broader public-private partnerships in animal welfare, including an April proposal that would expand nonprofit involvement in operating city shelters, said the near-simultaneous announcements of his June 30 partnership with Michelson Found Animals and the City Council’s approval the following day of the ASPCA/Best Friends grant were coincidental. But, he said, they reflect a larger trend.
“I think it is indicative of a trend,” Blumenfield said.
He said partnerships between the city and nonprofit welfare organizations are nothing new. But he believes Los Angeles is moving toward greater reliance on those organizations as it looks for ways to improve its shelter system.
“It’s not some sudden new thing,” Blumenfield said. “But it is something I think we’re moving towards.”
His $1.3-million partnership with Michelson Found Animals will expand mobile veterinary care and spay-and-neuter access in Council District 3 and the San Fernando Valley. Blumenfield said nonprofit and government play different roles: nonprofits often drive innovations, while the city is responsible for shelter intake, dangerous animals and cruelty investigations.
“The nonprofits have a way of being more nimble,” he said.
If the ASPCA and Best Friends grant proves successful, Blumenfield said, the city will need to continue funding the positions after the organizations’ three-year commitment expires.
“It’s probably an inducement that’s going to cause us to spend more on the long haul,” Blumenfield said. “We need to do that anyway. So that’s a good thing.”
That tension — philanthropy as catalyst, not replacement — came up repeatedly in interviews.
“No amount of private funding can stabilize a system that lacks consistent public investment,” said Jennifer Naitaki, managing director of Michelson Found Animals, the animal welfare arm of Los Angeles-based Michelson Philanthropies.
Naitaki said philanthropy can help governments move quickly and test creative ideas, but should not become a substitute for a public budget. Animal services, she said, remains a taxpayer-funded responsibility.
“Philanthropy should not supplement a city budget for animal services,” Naitaki said, “but it can strengthen and compound what the city is already doing.”
Not everyone agrees on where the next dollar should go.
The ASPCA and Best Friends grant is focused largely on shelter operations and staffing. Michelson’s partnership focuses upstream, on preventing animals from entering shelters by expanding access to affordable veterinary care and spay-and-neuter services.
Jeff Mausner, co-founder of the Global Anti-Dog Meat Coalition and second vice president of the Tarzana Neighborhood Council, said the grant will help but argued that the city’s most urgent need remains more funding and enforcement for spay-and-neuter programs.
“Failure to adequately fund spay/neuter is ‘penny wise and pound foolish,’” he said.
If the city had another $14 million to spend, Mausner said, he would direct it primarily toward spay-and-neuter funding.
“What has to be done is the number of dogs and cats being born, and then coming into the shelter system, has to be reduced,” he said.
Despite their different priorities, elected officials and animal welfare leaders interviewed for this story generally did not frame prevention and shelter operations as competing goals.
Blumenfield called them “two sides of the coin.” Naitaki said spay-and-neuter is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce shelter intake, but not the only lever needed. Shelters also need better procedures, more fosters, more adopters, stronger marketing and safer working conditions for staff, she said.
For Best Friends, the three-year timeline is meant to account not only for hiring and new programs, but for a culture shift.
“It’s a big ship,” Thorn said of L.A. Animal Services. “It takes a lot of time to turn things around there.”
The organization typically does shorter consulting engagements, she said, but concluded that Los Angeles would need more time.
“We’re not only looking at intake numbers, outcome numbers,” Thorn said. “Each number is an animal. Each number is a life.”
Amster said partnerships of this scale are essential for one of the nation’s highest-profile municipal shelter systems. The ASPCA and Best Friends, she said, bring not only financial resources but also experience working with shelters across the country.
If successful, she said, the collaboration, which she described as the first of its kind in animal welfare, could become a model for other organizations.
Five years from now, Naitaki said, success would mean a system that prevents more animals from entering shelters in the first place, and makes shelters a true refuge for those that must come in.
Thorn described a similar vision.
The city’s shelters, she said, should be “a place that people could go to when they truly need help” — not the first stop for every animal in crisis, but a safety net for the most vulnerable.
“If L.A. Animal Services, one of the largest shelter systems in the country, can do it,” Thorn said. “I think anyone could do it.”