2020 was a huge year for the Stray Animal Project team, as it was the first year since we formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3), and we grew our team to 8 members, all volunteers, and established partnerships with different animal associations to scale. 2020 was also the year that we surpassed 1000 spay and neuter procedures — in fact, our current impact is north of 1800 animals!
Accomplishments and kudos
1. We supported spay and neuter procedures for 751 animals. About a quarter of the procedures were through shelters, a third were for stray animals, and the remaining were through our 19 community campaigns. For contrast, our goal for 2021 is an ambitious 5000 animals across a goal of 6 campaigns per month (up from 1-2 campaigns/month in 2020).
2. Our analysis for 2020 estimates that nearly 95% of our donations went straight towards campaign operations. The remaining funding went towards fixed costs, such as running our website and financial transaction fees.
3. We actively invested in expanding our partnerships. We worked with community-run shelters, like that of Mr. Luis, with whom we facilitated fixing 23 animals. We also began trap-neuter-release (TNR) campaigns with a focus on feral cats; the program led to an additional 55 procedures in 2020.
4. We’re further investing in transparency with our recently obtained Silver Seal of Transparency through GuideStar (up from a Bronze Seal at the time of publishing the transparency report). We look forward to working towards our Gold Seal in 2021 and beyond.
Campaigns and partnerships
Our founder and CEO, Karina Canales, was interviewed for a profile in El Comercio, one of the oldest and most influential newspapers in Peru. Karina told the origin story for her love of animals and the Stray Animal Project and raised awareness of the importance to neuter/spay and educate on responsible pet ownership. Thank you to the team at El Comercio and our partners at WUF who made this possible!
With the ongoing COVID crisis and rising case rates, we’ve made some adjustments to keep our target communities safe. One change that we’ve made is to pay for spay and neuter procedures directly through animal hospitals. This keeps our community members by eliminating the need to bring their animals to massive campaigns.
On the donation front, we recently registered through PayPal Giving Fund, bringing it alongside our other donation integrations with Benevity and Donorbox to offer convenient ways to support us.
Moving into 2021...
In February we expanded our campaigns to two areas in Arequipa, and we’re very excited to be expanding for the first time outside of Lima! Just like in Lima, Arequipa has thousands of stray animals, and we’ve identified shelters that need our help with spay and neuter efforts.
