SAN FRANCISCO — Sherri Franklin sleeps each night with four dogs, give or take a mutt.
In fact, giving and taking mutts is what she does during her waking hours as founder and executive director of Muttville, a San Francisco-based senior dog rescue-and-foster shelter.
“She started taking in dogs at her home, and by 2007 she had too many, so she started Muttville,” said shelter board member Patty Stanton. “She started with 27 dogs adopted the first year; last year we rescued and adopted out over 800 seniors.”
With a dozen full- and part-time employees and a $2.1 million budget, Franklin hopes to help 1,000 dogs this year. We spoke with her recently about her work. Her comments have been edited for length and clarity.
You do hair. So how did you get into the dog-rescue thing?
When I was doing hair here, I started volunteering at the San Francisco SPCA. One day, I found a cat cowering under some cars in traffic, so I got it in my car and took it to the SPCA and asked them to let me know if the cat didn’t get claimed.
That was the catalyst?
I left there with a deep sadness and thought I could never go back. But that eventually turned into “I need to go because I can’t turn my back on these animals.”
I went back. I felt the animals weren’t getting love; they’d been abandoned and I knew some would be euthanized and it wasn’t their fault. By the early ’90s, I was obsessed, and I was volunteering at the shelter nearly five days a week, whenever I wasn’t doing hair. Soon I started taking dogs home with me, one at a time, dogs who were considered unadoptable.
And what happened?
I did some training with them and I started to find them homes. A friend on the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare told me I should apply, and I ended up serving as a volunteer on the commission for six years, five of them as vice chair.
So your in-home dog-saving efforts morphed into Muttville?
I kept having a dream that I could help more than one dog at a time because there was such a huge need in the rescue community, especially to help the older dogs that were dying in the shelters. I saw this as an egregious problem; people had dogs as pets but would not commit to keeping them when they got older. Or an older owner would pass away, and the older dogs just don’t stand much of a chance when that happens. I started taking classes on running a nonprofit and went to conferences on fundraising and animal sheltering.
In 2007, I opened a Muttville bank account and started taking donations. Friends started fostering my dogs, we started a website and the next thing I knew, it was 2009, Muttville was a nonprofit, and I was hiring a staff, even while we were still working out of my home.
It got to be too much for one house, right?
I outgrew my house. I knew the SPCA had a lot of space because they’d moved most of their offices to a new location. So I asked to rent some old space from them and we moved into our own shelter in 2012 (in San Francisco).
And the rest is dog-rescue history?
We are now a cage-free-environment shelter, housing dogs and doing foster-based rescue. We work with about 50 foster homes around the Bay Area, including San Jose and Berkeley and a ton in Oakland.
Running a business like this seems tough, especially when you’re competing with all the other worthy causes out there.
We get our money from private donors, foundations and fundraising events like Moolah for Mutts once a year; this year, we raised $675,000, but it’s always a roller coaster with funding. Today we’ll get funds, and they’ll last us a few months, but it’s a constant challenge to keep up with the need. Fortunately, all of our pets find permanent homes, although sometimes we have to euthanize our old guys for quality-of-life reasons.
Most of the money we raise goes to vet costs. We built an on-site vet suite, and we employ a full-time vet tech and a part-time vet. We do all of our wellness exams, microchipping and vaccines in house. To raise money, we do a lot of email blasts and Facebook posts, as well as our fundraisers. Besides a full-time staff, we’ve got 250 volunteers; it takes a lot to run a shelter like this.
So do senior humans adopt senior dogs?
Yes. Our Seniors for Seniors program has become really popular. A lot of families bring their elderly mother or father, and we have special adoption counselors to work with them. … We do a lot of matchmaking.
