Surviving COVID-19 as a small, local nonprofit
by Michel Meunier, Executive Director at ACTion Programs for Animals (APA), Las Cruces, NM(April 20 – 2020) These are very strange times. Never in my lifetime have I had to deal with a virus pandemic hitting so close to home, and navigating COVID-19 has been a big challenge, especially in my role as the ED of a local animal rescue organization. Everyone looks to me for guidance, and I was learning as I went along and doing my best to keep up with both the worldwide/national/local news and facts for my decision making.
I am blessed personally that my first job is working full-time for the federal government. That has meant that I have not had to deal with a personal layoff for my main source of income. I was sent home to telework while our sate is in lock down. And I am grateful every day for this blessing.
But my work as ED for APA is what brings me the most pride. I founded the organization in 2009 to start modeling lifesaving No Kill programs and philosophies that were foreign here at the time. By 2012, we were pulling animals out of our municipal shelter, saving now more than 5000 lives. And since 2009, we have grown by leaps and bounds.
But with growth comes some pain as well. We went from earning 10K a year at first to now earning more than 250K a year, and we now have two locations and paid staff. Our adoption center at 800 W Picacho has been open since 2016.
Then just last October, we opened our first thrift store, the Second Chance Thrift Store. This was our effort to bring some financial stability to our organization because it is hard to survive on unplanned donations and grants alone that may or may not come. We do not receive any local, state or federal government support. So, we wanted a steady source of income to help support us, and our store was doing well for being a newbie, but then a pandemic hit us, and we had to close our store in late March. And then we closed our adoption center shortly thereafter.
I have spent many a night worried about everything and everyone. We did not have a large sum of funds in reserve, so the first thing I had to do was figure out what to do about all our wonderful employees. We have two managers at each location with about 4 to 5 part-time support staff. And we had to lay most everyone off and go down to only essential shifts at our adoption center to care for the animals. And we had been scraping by until we received an SBA small-business COVID-19 loan that is supposed to help us retain our employees and pay our rents and utilities at both locations for a couple of months until we can reopen.
That was a sigh of relief except now most of our employees want to go on unemployment because they are paying people $600 a week. And we can’t pay them that much. And so this created a whole Catch-22 as a small business where you get a loan too little, too late to help retain employees who are now mostly gone. We are down to a skeleton staff now.
And in the meantime, how do we continue pulling animals from the shelter when we can’t be open to the public for adoptions or conduct fundraisers to raise money for the vet bills? And then vets cannot perform non-essential services right now either, and staples we rely on such as spay/neuter are on hold, too. So, it has all made us put a freeze on our lifesaving efforts.
All we are doing is trying to survive until we can go back to doing what we do best, saving the lives at-risk shelter animals that most other rescues do not want to take. We do so via wonderful foster homes who help us with cats/kittens/small dogs, via our adoption center where we house and care for sometimes more than 70 animals at a time, and via our PAWS prison training program in partnership with the Southern New Mexico Correctional Center. That program has been a blessing especially for large, unruly dogs we rescue and rehabilitate.
All I know is, I can’t wait for things to get back to normal, but I am also exercising caution and following stay-at-home and social distancing for both myself and my APA staff. We still do adoptions by appointment, and we safeguard or staff and visitors while conducting the adoptions. It has worked out okay so far; we have had some adoptions along the way.
We are also still helping people with our pet food bank. We now hold monthly parking lot distributions. We had our first last Saturday, and we literally ran completely out of dog food. Those will be every third Saturday of the month until we can open back up to normal operations.
To learn more about APA, visit our website or follow us on Facebook at:
Stay safe, everyone!