Frequently Asked Questions

What will we do with money donated to us?

What does success look like for us?

How will we measure impact?

With the money from the grant, we plan to host social events with high net worth individuals, being able to promote our cause and have them engaged with the charity (such as including HNWIs in our Board of Directors), as an article by Devon Reeser from ‘fundraisingIP.com’ states that high net worth individuals donate over 70% more to causes they are engaged with. We plan to use this grant to provide our team with a space of operations. We shall also provide modern, high-quality equipment to our rescue personnel so they can perform their tasks more effectively. Donations to Animals Impacted by Disasters Society will be used in addition to the grant, as we aim to replicate the grant’s overall use and spending to have our organization be functional long-term.

To help these pets and people, our organization will use large, spacious vehicles to enter a populated area before or after a disaster strikes it. Beforehand, we will pick up any domestic animals without owners, and respond to calls from residents who need us to look after their animals. We will work together with local shelters in other towns by delivering the pets to them and providing them with staffing relief when they have high numbers of animals to take care of. Post-disaster, we will look for any pets that might have been left behind, injured, or trapped. We will assist them on-scene and, when necessary, transport them to shelters and have professionally trained veterinarians assess their conditions, allowing volunteers or other veterinary professionals to treat them depending on the severity and complexity of any illness or infirmity. We will then put those animals without an owner up for adoption. We will return animals to any residents who we know to be the owners of animals or who claim ownership of them.

The ideal outcome of this organization is to be able to help support animals in areas affected by major dangerous weather events such as hurricanes, tornados, and more. Adding on to this, we also aim to become sustainable through donations for a long period of time. Success to us means to be able to effectively help animals by using donations in the most efficient way possible in order to save as many lives as possible.

To measure our impact, we will keep track of specific statistics such as each animal we successfully rescue, each pet we get back to their families, each animal who we find a new home for, and people who contact us to inform our team on how we have helped them and the people around them.

In what way are you helping people?

People love their animals, however, in high-stakes disaster situations, people often leave pets behind unintentionally or are forced to leave their pets behind by personnel helping in the evacuation. In Hurricane Katrina alone, over 250,000 pets were left behind and an estimated 150,000 died (CNN). Furthermore, according to CNN, “[i]t is estimated that 20-30% of all evacuation failures are due to pet ownership. Evacuation noncompliance not only puts civilians in danger, but also first responders who must enter dangerous areas to try to evacuate those who have refused to leave.” Since so many animals are abandoned because of disasters, and people weren’t evacuated out of fear of leaving their pets behind, creating a group to help ease people’s fear surrounding their animals in natural disasters could save a significant amount of human and animal lives. We will use our resources to save domesticated pets and strays, which have little chance of survival given their inability to flee from dangerous, unpredictable situations.

Is Animals Impacted by Disasters Society sustainable over the long term?

This foundation is capable of long-term sustainment mainly through donations, and due to natural disasters happening very frequently, people would have a constant need for support from us and would therefore be more interested in donating. We would mainly rely on donations through the use of our website, as well as hosted events for the goal of fundraising.

How is this orginization effectively altruistic?

Will MacAskill, a renowned effective altruist, defined a good problem to solve as one that is big, solvable, and neglected. As CNN found, hundreds of thousands of pets can die from natural disasters and can prevent their owners from leaving on a large scale, making this a big problem. Because this is a problem relating to the physical location of objects, specifically animals, people, and inclement weather, it is solvable. Lastly, government officials focus on the evacuation of human beings and try to mitigate damage to property as their priorities, making this a neglected issue. This organization aims to help save the lives of animals who have been misfortuned by being caught in the path of natural disasters. This utilizes the main principles of effective altruism: spending money on a cause to improve a morally problematic situation, and not on luxuries, and growing our ability to help through donations from individuals, who would otherwise spend the money on luxuries.