BAWA-Cooperation that Saves Lives
In this day and age, when inter-agency collaboration seems increasingly rare, there’s at least one exception to the rule. It’s called BAWA, the Baltimore Animal Welfare Alliance.
You may not have heard of BAWA, but when it comes to shelter animals, it’s one of the most important organizations in our area because it enables shelters to save more lives through cooperation with each other.
The seeds for BAWA were planted back in 2005 when Jen Brause took over what is now called BARCS, the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter. She wanted to make huge changes there, and concluded that two heads were better than one.
She reached out to then-Executive Director of the MD SPCA, Aileen Gabbey, and remembers, “We decided to create an alliance and start sharing information, working together, and being a support system to each other.”
That collaboration grew into the Baltimore Animal Welfare Alliance. Today it’s made up of BARCS, the MD SPCA, and the two other major shelters in our area, the Baltimore Humane Society (a private shelter like the MD SPCA) and Baltimore County Animal Services (an open admission shelter like BARCS). The Humane Society of Harford County attends BAWA monthly meetings as a guest.
BAWA members offer advice to one another. They discuss shared challenges and create collaborative solutions. Sometimes one shelter’s trends can provide a heads-up to the others.
Says MD SPCA Community Affairs Director, Katie Flory, “If one shelter is starting to see a lot of kittens come in, we know we are all about to have that issue as well.”
BAWA also promotes adoption. Every year its members hold the “Baltimore 500”, an effort to find homes for 500 cats in June, a time of high cat intake.
The newest BAWA collaborative effort is the Mega Adoption Event. It’s called “mega” because all the shelters bring their animals to one place like Timonium Fairgrounds and hundreds of adopters come to meet the animals. The last Mega Adoption event in December resulted in 181 adoptions in 2 hours!
“This showed people we are not competition to each other,” says Katie Flory. “We come together for a common goal and that is to save more animals’ lives.”
Dr. Melissa Jones, Chief of Animal Services in Baltimore County, says, “Combining our animal rescuing ideas through an alliance such as BAWA not only allows us to save more pets, but also sends a positive message about collaboration to our shared Baltimore community.”
In this day and age when bipartisanship is virtually nonexistent, when the European Union is no longer unified, and when the American people can’t seem to agree on much of anything, it’s comforting to know that at least some organizations can work together to achieve common goals.
Collaboration works. Imagine that.
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